I’d prodded the libertarians again, so they poked back en masse, and it was hilarious. The arguments were so familiar and so inane and so wrong that I had to say it: in any discussion about libertarians, the comments by libertarians will invariably make the stupidity of libertarianism clear (yes, I stole it with a twist from Lewis’ Law).
There was the usual knee-jerk attempt to associate me with that liberal socialist, Obama — because it doesn’t abide by the laws of PZ’s god Obama. Class warfare, confiscate and redistribute…
— followed by sneering comments that I’m a political naif and therefore ought to shut up about it. Look, Obama is not my god: as far as I’m concerned, he’s been a colossal disappointment, occasionally able to say a few good things, but a failure at doing them. He’s a center-right politician, a relatively conservative Democrat, who has expanded the surveillance state and maintained programs like Gitmo and the drone war that can only be described as villainous. He only looks good when compared to the circus full of clowns that the Republicans and Libertarians fielded in the last election.
So don’t call me politically inept when you think Obama is a socialist.
The other thing these libertarians did, so predictably and at least a little more productively, is try to tout the virtues of their political philosophy. Freedom, no initiation of force, no corporate welfare, no censorship, no drug war, peace…no initiation of force, individual liberty, live and let live, no corporate welfare, no drug war, etc.
Yes? So? Those are things progressive liberals are all for, too, and we do it without the destructive baggage of unfettered capitalism, which they all neatly leave off their laundry list.
You cannot call yourself pro-liberty, even including the word in your name, if you are unwilling to recognize that the greatest oppressive force opposing freedom in America is unregulated greed. Libertarianism is a philosophy for the well-off, the privileged, and those who dream someday of being a wealthy boss with power over the peons. When capital is the measure of success, those who have it thrive at the expense of those who don’t; when we don’t have redistribution of wealth, we do not have equality of opportunity.
The US is already a libertarian paradise, and look what it gets us: a widening gap between rich and poor, a rotting infrastructure as the exploiters look for short term gains while neglecting services vital to those who can’t afford a limousine service, a corrupt and decadent privileged class, and thriving new political parties that are simply nuts. To use one of Ayn Rand’s favorite words, this country is infested with looters: only they’re not the poor, they’re not the mythical “welfare queens”, they’re bankers and obscenely overpaid executives and corporations that demand the right to buy elections.
And there stand the libertarians, the useful idiots who cheer them on.
I take strong exception to this. I see no evidence that libertarians are useful
Then you disagree that the libertarians are useful to the bankers, executives and corporations?
A good friend of mine summed up the Randian philosophy quite well: “There’s no god, so we can all be assholes.” Or as Sam Harris so eloquently put it, and I paraphrase, libertarians are trying to call Aspergers a political philosophy.
Oh shit, PZ shows off his mean left hook.
Donovan@4,
Please leave off the ableism: do not liken being a selfish scumbag to being non-neurotypical.
Thank you.
They forget that they already had their little paradise, it was called the industrialisation. We all know what the conditions were.
Also, libertarians remind me of slavery-apologists, while slavery-apologists only picture themselves as masters and never as slaves, libertarians can only picture themselves as well-off, never as an underpaid worker slaving away.
Donovan,
Oi, no need to shit on people with Asperger’s.
I know several libertarians, I’m even related to a few. None of these people are wealthy and none of them came from wealth, and yet there they are, advocating for a system that wishes to enslave them. Unaware that if we were to live in their “libertarian paradise” they would not be the masters, they would be the peon in the street with no hope of ever making it out. You can’t reason with them, you can’t even use logic (and many of them are engineers!) to make them realize how incredibly moronic and destructive their philosophy is.
Definition of Libertarian Paradise™:
– No taxes
– No gun laws
– No functioning government
Welcome to Somalia!
What the Liberthugians fail to recognize is that the BigBad in Rand’s books were typically extremely wealthy “looters”, who got wealthy by exploiting the Creatives to yield all the Creator’s wealth to the wealthy. The wealthy would always try to make the Creatives feel guilty for not giving the results of their creativity to the wealthy (who payed for all the infrastructure supporting the creatives). The point she was trying to make was that the emotion of Guilt is inadequate as a trade for creativity, and that Guilt is self-imposed anyway. Her works were all about, “Do what you’re good at, listen to your Self, not all those guilt-mongers around you. Your Self should be your God, not that fictional being others write books about.”
She also totally rejected “Libertarianism” as derived from her “Objectivism”. She wrote repeatedly that Libertarianism was usurping her philosophy and doing it very badly, contradicting many of the tenets of Objectivism.
Objectivism was simply her response to Kant’s Subjectivism. Kant said that reality exists but everything we know about reality is purely subjective, that we ONLY know anything through our senses, etc. etc. All Rand was saying is, “Kant said reality exist. STOP right there. We are real, so our senses are real, and whatever our senses measure is real. Forget all that extra nonsense, Kant went too far and ended up making nonsense. Real is Real. Period. Stop.”
I’ve read too much Rand, excusing too much of what she actually wrote and “cherry-picking” just the little bits that I think are useful. Even “Randians” seem to get her all wrong: cherry picking the bits I did not, all the rotten cherries I rejected. I try to tell them I picked all the ripe cherries and they got all the rotten one, but they won’t listen to me, they’re wrong, but I can only tell them they are wrong. I mustn’t try to “guilt” them into agreeing with me. So, I confess. I am a Randian; but the only “true” Randian in existence. All others who claim to be Randians are wrong, or willfully lying. So maybe I’m a “creator” myself; cherry picking Rand’s philosophy to create my own unique version of hers. I also know that is a very egotistical statement to make. But isn’t that what Rand was all about: That egotism is the best way to consider reality? That what’s best for ME is good for everybody else, that one’s self is the standard of measurement? If something is good for him and bad for one’s self, then it is bad, period. If something is good for one’s self then it is good, period.
Anyway… I’m just rambling, trying to go too far in one direction to show myself how ridiculous it is, but it ain’t happening, so I’ll just pause now.
re “Libertarian Paradise:” @9:
That “listicle” is a perfect example of Libertarians usurping Rand misguidedly. Rand was NOT an anarchist (“no functioning government”) and advocated the government’s DUTY to protect people from each other (including gun laws), and that the government services are due PAYment (taxes).
Honestly, PZ. I expected better of you than to repeat this dumb Republican talking-point.
On his second day in office, Obama issued an executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. There is no denying this. There’s no way to spin that he didn’t. Conservatives went on a fear-mongering spree, with FOX News claiming that those horrible monstrous terrorists would be released onto American soil. Ultimately, Congressional Republicans (and a number of spineless Democrats) ended up striking down the funding necessary to close the facility.
Obama has been a failure in many respects, but the Republicans own Gitmo.
“The US is already a libertarian paradise”
*Bailouts
*FDIC
*Drug War
*Social Security
*Payroll Tax
*Medicare
*Medicaid
*Fiat money
*NASA
*NSA
*Afghanistan War
<sarcasm>How libertarian!</sarcasm>
-Has any libertarian ever disputed this, ever?
@6
It’s like when watching a zombie or other apocalyptic movie and people think they’re going to be the tough hero/last guardian of Civilization and not the skull by the side of the road with a big hairy spider crawling on it. It’s self-delusion at its worst.
@JohnnieCanuck, #2
-I do, ’cause they aren’t. They’re some of their worst enemies.
http://books.google.com/books?id=0M93iTZW6uQC
http://books.google.com/books?id=jA9UAZ2fKeoC
Hear, hear!
Apparently, for libertarians, coercion is only bad when it’s done by the government. When it’s done by a private business, it’s okay.
Seconded.
It’s like when watching a zombie or other apocalyptic movie and people think they’re going to be the tough hero/last guardian of Civilization and not the skull by the side of the road with a big hairy spider crawling on it. It’s self-delusion at its worst.
A vaguely remember reading a cracked article that phrased it this way: “They all think they’re going to be Mad Max, when really most of them would be the guy who tries to catch the razor boomerang.”
As for the question of how libertarians are able to get the lower classes they **** on to support them you have to remember that one of the biggest goals of libertarianism is bringing back the days of ‘whites only’ signs. Like the GOP, who they claim to oppose yet vote for every single time, they’re able to get people to support making their own lives miserable because they promise to make it even worse for the groups they hate.
Typical dishonest libertarian bullshit. Name one occasion on which libertarians have actually taken any effective action against bankers, executives and corporations (rather than just spouting anarcho-capitalist tosh). While you’re about it, explain why the Koch brothers are such avid contributers to libertarian think-tanks and propaganda.
FUCK YOU.
-an actual person with Asperger’s
(Beatrice, Nick Gotts, firstapproximation: :3)
Well, that and they’re able to convince the gullible that if they work hard and make the right choices, they too can someday hope to buy their own election.
Stevem
Yes, but she could never demonstrate how it was significantly different. It’s much like the insistence of e.g. Catholics that they’re real Christians but that the Eastern Orthodox aren’t. There’s not any difference that means anything to anyone who’s not a member of either sect; their disagreements are about abstruse points of theology, but their actions and effects on the world are largely equivalent.
And? She’s hardly got the only or even the best response to Kant. (The best response, IMO, is to chuck it and go read something useful and/or amusing instead. Rand is neither.)
Ah, the venerable ‘No True Scotsman’, with a side dish of claiming to know what Rand meant better than she did. Incidentally, she held up brutal child-murderer William Hickman as an example of the kind of superman her heroes were meant to emulate, so, you know, there’s that too.
Except, of course, that such an attitude makes society itself an impossibility, and can only exist parasitically on a society which largely does not share it.
Enoleptus Harding #13
I take it that this is the first thread on Pharyngula regarding libertarians that you’ve actually read, then? And that you’ve never read or seen excerpts from Reason Magazine, the AEI, the Von Mises Institute, or, in fact, any libertarian propaganda at all whatsvever? Your complaint above seems to indicate that you have, which makes me think ‘disingenuous prat’. On which note:
You’re opposed to one of the most effective antipoverty programs in U.S. history, as well as the most efficient deliverer of health insurance services in the nation. This kind of thing is why we don’t take libertarians seriously.
What other kind do you imagine exists? Gold as currency is no less arbitrary than colored paper, and considerably less efficient, in many, many ways.
#15
Oh wait, you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder. Libertarians are in favor of total deregulation of the banking and financial industry. Some of them delude themselves that this will somehow do something other than strengthen them, and thus believe that they are fighting the financial power. They are wrong. This is the ‘idiots’ part of ‘useful idiots’.
Much of the third world is also Libertarian.
Taxes are lowand enforcement is lax or nonexistent. Government regulations are also low and not enforced either. You might have to bribe the inspectors but it usually isn’t much.
The result is societies run by oligarchies that are stagnant and going nowhere.
We’ve tried Gibbertarianism at many times and places. Laissez faire capitalism of the 19th century, third world countries, Somalia. etc.. It’s an utopian fantasy like communism that doesn’t work in realityland.
It’s telling that all the best off countries in the world today aren’t Gibbertarian. The worst are.
My own theory is that they are still pushing the delusion that “if it weren’t for the gubment takin our moneies, I’d be rich like you people”. They think that just because they work hard that they should be rich. Since they’re not, someone is to blame and that someone is the government rather than having the wrong attitude. Getting rich is a matter of luck and initial social status. Those people who do get rich from hard were were at the right place at the right time. It’s a freak event that can’t be duplicated consistently.
In a way it reminds me of the lotto. Instead of pushing the impossible dream of “you too can become an instant millionaire” libertarianism is pushing the impossible dream of, “if you work hard and you are one of us you should be rich and if you’re not rich yet it’s because of the government”. Anything to avoid admitting the system itself is rigged and climbing upwards is extremely difficult and sliding downwards is extremely easy.
In the Libertarian Utopia, it’s pretty neat to be the guy (let’s be honest, it almost certainly would be a guy) on the top of the heap. The other 99.9% of the population has a pretty shitty time of it, though.
Most libertarians suffer from the delusion that they’d be they guy at the top.
As an ex-libertarian who has never been more than lower middle class, this is basically how it works. In a way it’s a sort of cargo-cult mentality, adopting bourgeois values in the hopes that they will somehow bring along bourgeois privileges.
Libertarianism seems to be the opposite of the veil of ignorance.
Just add in the proviso that you are gonna be on the top of society because you work so much harder than the government scroungers and its a great idea.
re Dalillama, Schmott Guy @21:
Your reply to me; I agree with completely. You expressed many things I left tacit. Yes, I was pulling a “No True Scotsman” fallacy, and realized it. I understand my view is a very narrow view of her “philosophy” and that it would be much more rational to consider it holistically. Much of it is very hateful and disgusting. Let me just cherry-pick the few aspects of it that SEEM rational.
@ Nick Gotts, #18
Define “effective action”.
@ Dalillama, Schmott Guy, #21
-I have seen plenty of “libertarian propaganda”, as you call it, “from Reason Magazine, the AEI, the Von Mises Institute”. Never have I seen any statement from such “propaganda” that is in disagreement with
-Medicare was one of the causes of the healthcare price crisis that started in the late 1960s.
http://bastiat.mises.org/2013/12/how-government-regulations-made-healthcare-so-expensive/
I am sure that mandatory IRAs would be superior to the present Social Security system-as ssa.gov states,
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v68n2/v68n2p69.html
Such a system would still not be libertarian, though, as it involves government mandates not solely for the protection of life, liberty, and property.
-I consider fiat money to be any medium of exchange that
1. is declared by a government to be legal tender and
2. which can only be created with the permission of that government.
Thus, gold is not fiat money. Gold isn’t all that arbitrary, either- it was used as a medium of exchange around the world for far longer than paper.
-Libertarianism prohibits violation of contracts. Such violation includes arbitrary suspensions in specie payments, which banks were strongly in favor of before the rise of the FDIC. Most libertarians I know of oppose the existence of the FDIC as well. Also, as banks and the financial industry have such a large influence over the U.S. government, why are there any regulations on banks or the financial industry at all?
@raven #22
-Enforcement being nonexistent may be a feature, but it is often a bug. One of the foundations of any libertarian society is reliable ability to enforce contracts and agreements. If enforcement is nonexistent, than this foundation is nonexistent as well.
Enopoletus Harding@28,
Typical dishonest libertarian wriggling: action that actually prevented bankers, executives, corporations from achieving or maintaining a significant goal. You have the whole world and the whole of history to choose from – surely your only problem should be choosing between the myriad clear examples.
How odd, then, that many countries in which the government is far more involved in the healthcare system than in the USA get superior results at much lower cost.
So. Fucking. What? The main aim of most pension reforms in that period – which has seen vast increases in economic inequality within most countries – has been to cut costs at the expense of workers.
Here’s a quote from your link:
But then we have, from you:
So what’s the supposed relevance anyway?
#29 you forget that even where tax enforcement exists it affects mainly the poor and working population, with special exemptions for anyone rich enough to own a politician or three.
Because after significant failures by the banks and financial industries, politicians bow to a combination of public pressure and their own fear and enact regulation that are reasonably sound. As the economy recovers, the banks and other members of the financial industry slowly reclaim their power and re-exert influence, eroding the very regulations that keep them in check and the system working relatively well.
At least, that’s how it was in the past. No sane regulations were enacted after this last failure, leaving the financial industry unfettered to continue their malfeasance once the public eye is no longer on them.
Just like a libertarian to use a substance that is useful in industry as the standard of currency, driving the cost of industry up without providing a real benefit to society.
Talk about efficiency and “freedom” (for who?) all you damn well want.
Here’s my issue with libertarianism: libertarianism, to work optimally, presumes equality of opportunity. In fact, prod a libertarian enough and they’d admit that without everyone having an equal shot, the system would degenerate into a plutocratic shithole in a hurry.
We do not have equality of opportunity today. Most (if not all) of libertarians seem to oppose those half-hearted measures the government (and various NGOs) try to ensure equality of opportunity (on “freedom of association” grounds, it seems). Which is why I feel comfortable dismissing 95% of libertarians as brats whining about how they don’t want to share their toys with those people and they got all their goodies by working for it on their own [conveniently ignoring the 5,000 ways someone else helped them since last Tuesday].
you all should cruise the libertarianismin4words hashtag on twitter. its friggin hilarious.
“every sociopath for himself”
“soylent green is people”
“such liberty wow mine”
“drown. I don’t care”
“you can’t violate my liberty by telling me how many words to use”
@ Nick Gotts #30
-My motives were perfectly honest. Since libertarians have never had any significant political power, I cannot point to such examples.
-I did say “I am sure that mandatory IRAs would be superior to the present Social Security system”. That is the supposed relevance.
-How is it odd?
Enopoletus Harding@28:
Did you even read past the first sentence? The third sentence;
So you actually meant ‘mandatory IRAs plus whatever public money is required to make up for mismanagement by profiteers’?
It isn’t. What is odd is those claiming the free market system is the best. When there is solid and conclusive evidence it isn’t, like the results of health care versus cost in the USA, compared to Canada and Europe. Medicare is a very efficient program.
@Avo, also nigelTheBold #32
–Right. You betcha.
-Worldwide use of gold as money would cut down on currency exchange fees. That’s a real benefit to society.
I’ve never actually seen a really good libertarian attempt to address the problems of inequalities of opportunity. I have seen plenty of individual stories trotted out, find someone that was able to work their way out of poverty, but of course that is pretty useless, no one argues that a lack of opportunities makes it utterly impossible, but it makes it much harder and in the last 40 years it has been getting harder and harder to improve your lot.
Enopoletus Harding @38:
Why exactly does it sound like a good idea to link the amount of money in circulation to the amount of a random metal we dig out of the ground?
Ahhhh, it’s been used for a Long Time, therefore the decision to use it as tender wasn’t arbitrary. Got it.
The Internet shows a glimpse of how good a true free market could be. The minimized cost of opportunity has allowed enterprises to rise from a few nerds in a basement to massive businesses, and then face stiff competition from yet more nerds in a basement. Of course, no glibertarian would dare use the Internet as an argument since the State has shown to be absolutely necessary for its formation AND to keep it from becoming Television 2.0.
I am aware that said nerds only managed to start up their businesses by convincing people who were already rich to spend lots of money on their ideas.
If you really want to annoy the lolberts, just point them to the following article by Andrew Levine: “Obama the Deregulationist”. In it, Levine lays out a convincing case that “Obama is a libertarian, and therefore not, according to the most pertinent sense of the term in our political discourse today, a liberal.”
I read that essay, along with several others gleaned from Counterpunch columns during Obama’s first term, in Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank (eds.). I highly recommend it to everyone. You can either read the volume itself or look up its table of contents online and then searching out the individual articles, because most of them are available for free.
It sounds a bit like the alt med argument from antiquity. There are certainly reasons it was used as a medium of exchange in the past, it is rare but not really, really rare, it stable, looks different than other metals, unlike silver. Those are important things when the value of your money is tied up in the actual physical bits of currency. Coins that rust away, or can be faked with similar looking materials would not be very good. As for their importance now, probably not so much.
“You cannot call yourself pro-liberty, even including the word in your name, if you are unwilling to recognize that the greatest oppressive force opposing freedom in America is unregulated greed.”
This is where I take exception. Unregulated greed is not the greatest force opposing freedom. Capitalism is, in its regulated or unregulated form. This is why all consistent libertarians are libertarian socialists.
And fail like this: “The other thing these libertarians did, so predictably and at least a little more productively, is try to tout the virtues of their political philosophy. “Freedom, no initiation of force, no corporate welfare, no censorship, no drug war, peace…no initiation of force, individual liberty, live and let live, no corporate welfare, no drug war, etc.” Yes? So? Those are things progressive liberals are all for, too, and we do it without the destructive baggage of unfettered capitalism, which they all neatly leave off their laundry list.”
Um, “unfettered capitalism” IS the non-initiation of force and live and let live! The only way to fetter capitalism is to USE force!
Just once it’d be nice to see a statist who knows their definitions.
And really? You don’t believe in the initiation of force? Okay. Say I don’t want to fund something you want me to (yes, even science funding via the state–no sacred cows please. :P) and would rather spend my own money on something else. Are you going to stop me? By force if necessary?
If not, you’re a free market libertarian too.
If yes, grats, you do believe in the initiation of force. Simple, no?
@tdog:
How can you be so implausibly ignorant. The issue is, again,
no initiation of force.
Capitalism is not consumer behavior.
Just once it’d be nice to see a libertarian who knows their definitions.
Additionally, regulation of capital can be a response to force rather than an initiation of force.
Finally, under unfettered capitalism, no corporations would exist.
Show me one libertarian that seriously advocates eradicating any legal structure of incorporation.
Ignorance? You’re soaking in it.
Bah! Blockquote fail.
Enoleptus Harding #28
Citation needed. One with actual numbers and data, not this Von Mises crap.
Oh wow, you’re using Pinochet’s Chile as your example of freedom improving things? Nick Gotts already pointed out that you’re ignoring the substance of your own link, which contradicts your claim, but I really feel I should hammer on this one, because it’s one that libertarians love to pull out. Chile ran it’s economy into the ground following the prescriptions of Milton Freidman, prescriptions which couldn’t be implemented without a fascist coup. Forgive me if your talk of freedom seems awfully fucking hollow when that is your go to example, you flaming asshole.
Except, you know, how gold currency was minted by governments, and no one was allowed to mint any without government permission, and the way that the face value of the coins was decreed by what was minted on them, irrespective of the actual gold vs. other metallic content of the coin in question. Aside from that, gold currency shares no similarities at all with fiat currency. You jackasses really should study at least a little bit of history before you start spouting off.
And do you want to know why? Because it’s a) easy to mint b) hard to counterfeit and c) prior to the electronics industry it’s not good for much of anything else. These are very similar to the reasons we now use linen paper printed with special inks, etc, which are also available in larger quantity than gold, which is a good thing given the size of the world economy these days.
So, you oppose the existence of big banks, but also oppose the existence of something that keeps them at least marginally honest. Consistency never was a libertarian strong suit though.
#35
And yet you can provide no actual evidence that this is the case.
#38
Note the word ‘sane’. It is an important word, although I might have chosen ‘effective’. Nevertheless, the laws you cite are not it, and indeed are the merest fraction of the Glass Steagall act, itself only barely adequate and now no longer in force.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! You’ve maybe heard a rather famous biblical story about someone or other driving the moneychangers out of someplace or other? What do you suppose the moneychangers did, and how do you imagine they made a living? Take your time answering, I know that acquiring actual knowledge is hard for you.
tdog #47
You really are an idiot. The very existence of capitalism is predicated on the use of force and other types of coercion. Notably, the ability to claim large amounts of property are yours in the face of your not doing anything with them and other people doing useful work with them and thus you are due the greater share of what they reap from their labors requires force to institute, and continues due to economic coercion backed with force. E.g. the Company Town.
I realized a while ago that libertarians mean a completely different thing by the word “freedom”.
Most people, I think, would consider “freedom” in the sense of “freedom from slavery”. Libertarianism tends to mean “freedom to own slaves”.
Oh, yes, stevem #28
The few things that Rand was vaguely correct on can be learned better and faster from an Intro to Logic textbook, with the added advantage that the rest of the book is also useful, rather than blithering sociopathy and stunning ignorance such as you’ll find in Rand. (She knew nothing, and refused to learn, about sociology, psychology, biology, physics, and several other major scientific disciplines, and it shows).
@zibble, #52
-Completely the opposite of the truth. Libertarianism tends to mean “freedom from slavery”. Libertarianism does not mean “freedom to have the company you work for bailed out” or “freedom to not starve”.
Enopoletus Harding
Do you think that people should be allowed to starve when the issue is something other than an absolute lack of foodstuffs?
To go more broadly, is there a minimum standard of living that every person is entitled to?
@Dalillama, Schmott Guy #51
-This “Von Mises crap” contains “actual numbers and data”.
-In its early days, the United States did allow use of foreign coins as currency.
–Not the case. Its economy wasn’t that great under Pinochet (it went from the Latin American average at the beginning of his reign to the Latin American average at its end), but it wasn’t run into the ground. In any case, how do you explain Chile’s rapid economic growth from 1984 onwards?
-Don’t forget that it had no long-term tendency towards losing its value.
-No, I don’t. In fact, their existence may be one of the greatest bulwarks against such a huge series of bank failures as the U.S. experienced during the Great Depression. I just oppose those running them having political influence.
-I support its replacement with bankruptcy for the banks. This may, however cause crises the severity of the Great Depression if small banks are given legal privileges by state governments.
-Wrong. Both of these are part of the Dodd-Frank act, enacted in 2010. You know- after Sept. 15, 2008.
-Moneychangers at the Temple were for Jews, not for atheists. Of course money changers existed in the Roman empire; they were just less frequented than currency exchanges are today.
-The libertarian answer to this is “no”.
@Rob Grigjanis #40
-Irrelevant. Besides, the causes of these can all be reduced to either legal restrictions on branch banking by the states or banks’ understanding that they could suspend specie payments whenever crisis struck.
Why does X = Gold?? Anything as X as a universal currency would ALSO eliminate ‘currency-exchange-costs’ Why NOT a ‘different’ paper with difficult to copy patterns all over it (i.e. every single currency in existence). AND if gold was NOT a currency it be far more valuable and collectible as a rare, pretty metal.
That’s my other gripe about libertarianism: it ignores that humans are social animals. We are not, nor have we ever been, otherwise.
There’s a reason that archaeologists and anthropologists talk excitedly about graves of Neanderthals and other ancient hominids that contain remains that indicate clearly that the person must have been tended to by an attentive caregiver (i.e. that they would have died otherwise, and plainly lived some time past when they would have died sans caregiver).
There’s a reason why they’re excited about the existence of graves, period.
Our caring for each other – including post-mortem – is one of the things that makes us human.
Early European and Near Eastern coinages were something I actually did pay attention to at Uni. We can see everything from unregulated bullion trading to fiat token coinages as they come and go, over the millenium or so we studied. One recurring theme is that, while bullion still gets used for international and major transactions, just about every community I can think of either debases its coins or issues a token coinage to increase the money supply internally. Then there was the fun that happened when new precious metal reserves were found and exploited – regional balance of power goes crazy and inflation gets interesting. Finally, since every state is minting their own currencies (bullion and fiat both most of the time, grading into each other with the debased bullion coinages), you still have a huge, messy, market in re-smelting bullion coins and changing token ones every time you moved states.
tl:dr fiat coinages are just too damn useful to eliminate, going by the historical examples I’m aware of.
Enoleptus Harding #56
Verifiable, peer reviewed data, cupcake. See my comment to Tdog earlier.
The United States does that now, you halfwit. There’s plenty of places on the border where you can spend Canadian or Mexican currency, depending on the border. You won’t get full face value of it, though. The same went for other places in the past; you could use foreign coinage, but you wouldn’t get full face value for it, because the recipient would have to take it to a moneychanger (That word sound familiar? It should). The case to which your link refers stems from the fact that at that time the U.S. hadn’t in fact had time to mint much coinage of its own, as indeed at the time of the act you reference there had only been a U.S. Mint for about half a year. You will note that foreign coinage was increasingly removed from circulation as U.S. currency began to circulate. Your source mentions the removal of all but Spanish currency within 30 years of the act referenced.
Except when a new mine was opened, or a new source of import developed. You know, like the way that the Spanish economy collapsed in the 1500s due to massive inflation caused by a huge influx of gold from the New World?
So, you weren’t paying any attention at all to the reasons why there was a bailout, and why the U.S. economy has been in the shitter for the past several years? I’ll give you a hint: It involved big banks having big big failures. Incidentally, the FDIC and similar instruments (like the bailout, although that was hardly an optimal solution) are, in fact, what has prevented the huge series of bank failures such as the U.S. experiences every couple decades until the 1940s. That’s why we have them.
Yes, those are part of the Dodd-Frank act. The Dodd-Frank-act is a very poor substitute for the Glass-Steagall act, which was itself only marginally adequate, as I noted earlier. You appear to be actively losing your reading comprehension as the discussion continues.
The point was that moneychangers have existed since antiquity, shit for brains.
Only insofar as there is a larger amount of currency in circulation today than there was then, and a larger number of international transactions.
And this is why libertarians are pretty unpopular. Given the option, most people would rather have the freedom to not starve.
Perhaps the more accurate question is, is there a minimum standard of living that every decent humane person should want to ensure that all other humans have, in order to qualify for being a decent, humane human being?
It isn’t about what other people are “entitled” to. It is about what we as good, decent individuals, should be willing to give to others.
Seconded, from the mom of a sweet little boy with Aspergers.
Enopoletus Harding:
My answer to this is “the Dustbin of History has been holding it’s lid open for you. What are you waiting for?”. Also mild nausea.
Yes.
The alternative means killing off the people you don’t approve of, which obviously is quite libertarian, but a very shitty thing to do.
The libertarian “there should be no such thing as a social net” attitude suffers from the same problem that anti-vaxxers have: they’ve never personally witnessed living in a society that doesn’t have that safety in place, and lack the understanding to comprehend what taking it away would really mean. I would think even a libertarian might cringe a little at having to physically step over people dying in the streets from epidemics and starving and whatnot.
The idea that taxation is an “initiation of force,” as I’ve seen some libertarians claim, is amusing. Taxation is the equivalent of rent. No libertarian would support the right of any random person to live in/on their property without monetary or other compensation. Yet they think they should be able to live in a country without paying for it. Or, conversely, that paying money for goods and services is only legitimate if it is to a private individual or company.
Okay, so here’s the other thing about “deregulation”.
Libertarians endorse tort claims as a mechanism for preserving liberty in the face of others’ harmful acts **in lieu** of regulation, in part because of “initiation of force” and in part because of preservation of liberty unless and until harming some other. But, this is an idiotic idea because they haven’t thought about the answers to 2 questions:
1. In what way is regulation in response to an existing problem different from a court judgement responding to an existing problem when one is analyzing government action on the “initiation of force” principle?
2. In what way is tort precedent – about which businesses/business persons would have to know and with which they would have to comply unless they wanted to pay a penalty – fundamentally different from regulatory law?
The value of an economy is in production. This makes it a plastic resource. As the ratio of production vs. cost of production goes up, the value of the economy rises. This makes economy (that is, the total value of a society) plastic.
Gold is a limited resource. The economy is not — it’s a plastic resource. To predicate a plastic resource on a set, limited resource is ridiculous. To assume a limited resource that was fine for 1B people (in spite of the poor performance as documented upstream) will work in a world with 10B people just doesn’t make sense. Second, because that limited resource is not plastic, an economy cannot count on that resource to adjust to changes in a plastic economy. The value of gold adjusts more to perception of value than actual value, or the economy. This makes its value easily manipulated via perceived scarcity or commonality.
Further, gold is useful in industry. It has a distinct measurable value in industry (as opposed to its subjective perceived value in economy). This means industry is doubly sensitive to fluctuations in subjective gold valuation — first in production, and second at market. This kind of double-jeopardy makes specific industries more sensitive to arbitrary valuations of gold.
All of this is completely derived from the very precepts of capitalism (the very heart of American-style libertarianism). Value = sale cost – production cost. This can be measured for an entire society — and it fluctuates from year to year. In any case, the unit of commerce must relate to the value of the society. Otherwise you cannot have fair contractual services. If I contract expecting one unit of value in six months, but the unit of contractual value drops, I do not receive the value I originally contracted for.
So, either the value of gold is tied to economic production (which makes it more-or-less predictable in value, and essentially a fiat currency), or the value of contracts changes over the time covered by the contract, leading to people receiving less (or more) value than anticipated when the contract was entered into.
Either way, the Libertarian ideal is not well-served.
This is just one of the many internal contradictions of Libertarianism. (And not even the biggest, which is inherent in the distinction between liberty and freedom. HINT: I may be at liberty to do the things Warren Buffet does, but I’ll never have the freedom he has.)
Libertarianism does not mean freedom to not starve?
And you get up in arms when people call you sociopaths. Thanks for putting up so succintly why I don’t want anything to do with libertarianism. You think an abstract, numinous “freedom” is more important than not fucking starving to death.
Look I am a libertarian and I can understand people disagreeing with my views. Not only can I understand it, but I can except it. I completely disagree with liberals, but I would not say that the liberal school of thought is stupid. When you say that something you disagree with is stupid or call a group of people idiots, you take your own argument and you completely destroy it. If you want people to think about what you say in an objective manner, don’t call them idiots, or say that there entire school of thought is stupid. I would love to have a pleasant argument and state my views, but I feel as though I would just be attacked again and called an “idiot” for stating my opinion so I choose not to.
rusty shackleford:
No.
When you demonstrate that something you disagree with is logically wrong, you do not undermine your own argument. Libertarianism is demonstrably wrong, just like communism is demonstrably wrong. Sure, it sounds good on paper, but it’s been tried, and it fails to correct for human nature.
When you present two solutions to the same problem, the way to judge which solution is better is to look at evidence and logic. So far, there is much evidence and logic presented here against libertarianism. If you wish to defend libertarianism, you have to address the evidence and the logic against it.
If you don’t like liberalism, the way to argue against it is to present evidence that it doesn’t work, and logic to demonstrate why it doesn’t work.
Like we’ve done for libertarianism.
Just saying you don’t like the fact we argue against libertarianism isn’t sufficient to defend libertarianism, nor is it sufficient to argue against liberalism.
exceptaccept
Why do you think that?
Dear Libertarians,
We deeply regret that you are so poorly educated in matters ranging from civics to basic math that you would consider a badly written and frankly boring novel to be a valid basis for anything, much less an a system of government or viable economic model.
It is regrettable that the ignorant feel entitled to have their (note proper spelling) ignorance validated with respect, rather than the loud mocking and derision which is completely appropriate to people who cannot distinguish between reality and a bad book.
Kindest regards
the Liberals
I am going to be harsh, but if you actually mean this you are stupid. If you just mean it makes you unlikely to respond to the argument because it hurts your feelings, or you think it is mean or unfair, then you might have a point; you might be able to argue it is a tactical mistake, though this has been discussed to death here so it does make me wonder if you are new around here. However, it does not destroy the argument at all, it is not wrong because you cannot bring yourself to respond to the argument that was made.
Didn’t we have this discussion about validating ignorance back in the Chris Mooney/Accomodationist days? rusty shackleford’s comment reminds me very much of the people saying how terribly mean it was to call out creationists ideas, that it will make them all so sad and they will turn away. I also have to wonder if those who are offended by this have mocked the religious, or is it just their ideas that should not be mocked?
Oh yes, the tone argument is a long running ploy of those who have no factual basis for their opinions.
Apparently, pointing out that history is full of examples of libertarian type policies being disastrous for the majority is best refuted by yelling “You guys are all such big meaniepants that I won’t even share my argument with you! Respect my authoritie!”
I’ve come to think of it as argumentum ad Cartman.
Flat-earthers are idiots. Oh god, I just completely destroyed the notion that the earth is a sphere (close to).
Is this how logic works in libertarian fantasy land?
It’s not a “pleasant argument” for people who have actually lived under poverty. It’s not a “pleasant argument” when people watch others cheerfully vote to cut their only source of food because of some lofty ideal of bootstraps. There are actual stakes, with actual people suffering from the results.
And if being called an idiot is all it takes for you to back down and not state your opinions, well, thanks for admitting that you don’t hold them strongly enough to suffer even such a tiny bit of discomfort in order to try to convince others of their correctness. If only all libertarians had your level of stamina.
I don’t think libertarians are stupid.
I think they’re empathy-deficient sociopaths. That doesn’t mean the same thing as stupid.
Imagine saying with a straight face that people aren’t entitled to not starve, as though there were nothing wrong with such a contention. Saying that socialism is wrong, because it was tried that one time, and then Stalin, so obviously we should never share anything again, libertarianist paradise, the end QED nana boo boo. But then equally saying that “libertarianism has never been tried”. I invite you to a little place they call Afghanistan, been shaking off anyone trying to impose rules from outside for a long, long time. Libertarian paradise: everyone’s armed, and everyone’s terrified. Most of them are starving, except those whose sociopathy is so overweening that they have become local warlords.
How, exactly, is the libertarian paradise supposed to prevent comrade Stalin? We’re told over and over that any kind of socialism is a straight path to totalitarian dictatorship, but that “every man for himself, and last one eating a poor person is a lousy carer/sharer/moocher!” is supposed to lead to the Promised Land of happy freedom?
Stupid? No. Sociopathic? Yes. Won’t be inclined to suggest otherwise, neither.
One word professor: excellent!
Thanks for expression the truth and keeping their feet to the fire.
(Care to run for office? If [Ronny Reagan, Sonny Bono, ‘Gopher’ from Love Boat, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Al Franken and so many others, including no-nothing doctors and scientists] can run for office –and win– why not a sharp, enthusiastic professor from Minnesota??)
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
Okay, what is the libertarian solution to this? How do we prevent big banks from buying politicians or abusing their power and influence in general?
@rusty shackleford – 31 December 2013 at 6:05 pm (UTC -6)
The libertarian political philosophy is a reactionary scam. Like many right wing doctrines it has an inside and an outside. The outside is that crazy quilt of vacuous beliefs about government being evil, delusions of personal power, and hatred of “unworthy” people, that is believed by the libertarian useful idiots. It doesn’t make logical sense but it adherents don’t appreciate sense anyway, so it serves its purpose.
The inside is a straightforward call for oligarchy, an argument that the wealthy must rule and the poor must obey. The inner part is not a crazy quilt like the outside, it’s an essay explaining how to use the stupid public’s vanity and prejudice to divide it, and maintain the supremacy of the wealthy. The libertarian thought-leaders put a lot of time into crafting lies, and they are pretty good at it. So if you’re a libertarian you’re either someone who actually stands to benefit from the impoverishment of the public, or, much more likely, you’re a useful idiot who believes a scam designed by your betters.
Libertarians remind me of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin says that he wants to live without following the rules.
Hobbes shoves him into the mud. Calvin is incensed. Hobbes reminds him that he wanted to live in a world without rules.
Calvin says, “I meant me you idiot!”
@CaitieCat – 31 December 2013 at 6:52 pm (UTC -6)
It’s really both, I think. While some of them are actually sociopaths, I think a lot of them are just dim and/or narcissist.
“No initiation of force” sounds good, but it is really the most worthless phrase since “thou shall not kill”. “That factory down the road is initiating force against me with its pollution” says the eco-terrorist and goes for his rifle, “that slaughter-house is initiating force against my fellow living creatures” says the animal rights activist and goes to grab his rifle, “all private property is based on force” say the communist etc, you get the idea. The problem is really to establish *when* force is justified and how *much* force is justified in those cases. The principle of non-initiation of force solves nothing, it just makes libertarians feel good about themselves.
Goodbye.
CaitieCat 82
Be fair, a lot of them are also stupid. Or, at any rate, ignorant, hidebound, pigheaded, short-sighted and lacking in critical thinking skills, which combine into a pretty good approximation of deeply stupid.
firstapproximation 84
You appear to have me confused with Enoleptus Harding, whom you were quoting just there, not me. Libertarians haven’t got an answer to that one. My (non-libertarian) answers would involve campaign finance reform and credit unions.
@k_machine – 31 December 2013 at 7:20 pm (UTC -6)
You’re right it’s meaningless. What I also note is that it’s a weirdly technical, legalistic sounding phrase. I can’t remember where I read this, but don’t a lot of far right militia types believe that if they can just find the right phrasing, and state it in court, they will get their way? It seems like a right-wing motif.
Folks, I’ve got some real controversial views, but if I voice them, you will call me an idiot. If you call me an idiot, I will have then won the argument. So, there is really no point in arguing with me; I have already won, right?
It is elementary, by which I mean an elementary school level argumentation.
Wow didn’t think this would get so much of a response. It doesn’t offend me to be called an idiot, I’m not six. It’s just that two adults generally do not call each other names over a disagreement of opinion. I know the drill now everyone says your just a libertarian because you don’t care about other people. Well, not all libertarians agree with me on this, I’m a bit of an extremist so don’t stereotype all people of my party because of me but let me just say that, your right. I really don’t care about the affairs of other people. I didn’t come from a good background, but Iv’e managed to make an honest living without a college education. So my point really is that in my opinion, it’s not my job to care about you, that’s your job. I’m going to get boiled for that I’m sure.
How exactly does a libertarian society enforce the contracts between people that it values so highly without initiation of force?
If, in a libertarian society, you mail me goods and I refuse to mail payment in return, that’s it? We’re done? Or might there be just a teensy bit of force involved?
And, of course, the follow-up question: but what if (given that I am a thieving scoundrel unlike your honest self), I can hire a bigger private army than you? You just shrug off the loss, right?
And hope it’s not, I dunno, your house or life savings or something.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy
Apologies!
Magic words! Just like in the Bible!
Well Anri, It seems that you are confusing libertarianism with anarchism. In a Libertarian society, the government would be there to stop the initiation of force. Stealing is the initiation of a type of force, so you would be arrested, tried, and convicted just like now.
rusty shackleford @ 98
And yet somehow Libertarians don’t recognize the force involved in wage slavery and people being denied the payment for the full value of their own work. It’s theft if a business owner fails to receive payment for a product, but just the free market at work when employees don’t get fair compensation. After all, they could just head on down the road (hopefully! maybe!) to some other exploitative job.
It is refreshing to get some honest libertarians tonight.
No, not boiled, just called an unsympathetic asshole.
Watch…
You are an unsympathetic asshole. See, no third degree burns.
Well Monkey, they weren’t forced to take that job.
@rusty shackleford:
Except stealing isn’t involved.
The person has just indefinitely delayed payment.
If I’m panhandling, and you choose to give me $10 when I promise to spend it on a hamburger, fries, and some OJ, have I initiated force if I actually spend it on a veggie burger, onion rings, and a shake?
If not, and if I have therefore acquired money by deception on the theory that a broken promise is deception, how does the broken promise to send money later for a product delivered to my home constitute force?
if it is an initiation of force, then can I shoot any panhandler to death after they break such a promise? Can I have them prosecuted for theft? What is the force-remedy to which I am entitled?
Further, where are such limitations on force codified? Are these not regulations? Is that not the government initiating force to constrain my liberty in responding to force?
What exactly are you looking to get out of this discussion, rusty? Does playing the martyr and pretending that criticism of your ill-thought-out ideology is somehow a terrible attack on you give you much happy-feels?
Sure, they could have fucking just starved in the street, amirite? Because safety nets and livable wages are “initiation of force” or something.
You are disgusting*.
*Oh noes, I just dumped boiling water all over you. Fucking idiot.
Oh, that wasn’t goodbye? Okay, I’ll bite: You’re an idiot, rusty. Now run along back to your Fortress of Self-Made Selfitude.
It is almost as though survival is not a constraint in your world. You offer freedom with your worldview, but it is an empty form freedom.
Rey Fox,
By not going away after saying goodbye, rusty Self-Made shackleford is being deceptive and initiating force. Get the water simmering.
@rusty:
I still want an answer to the original questions in my #102, but your #98 answered the part of my question that read:
But only partly: If one is permitted to kill to defend oneself or one’s possessions from theft (as one is in many legal systems in the US), am I entitled to shoot a panhandler to death if my minor child is about to hand over money to a panhandler on false pretenses? Under law, the child’s cash is mine. Further suppose this happens on my property – my child is on the front lawn and the panhandler happens by and asks for the cash.
Why can I or can’t I shoot the panhandler?
Could it possibly be because deception isn’t fucking force?
Looking at your comment:
Then the government has limited liberty in a particular case where harm has not yet resulted merely because in the past doing X has caused harm.
How is this different from the hated regulation of capitalism? Why regulate false advertising except to stop the initiation of theft?
Could you possibly mean, as most libertarians insist, that the government wouldn’t intervene until harm has occurred? That’s at odds with your statement.
Possible conclusions:
1) you lie
2) you have no coherent thought to communicate which might differentiate anarchism from libertarianism
3) you have a coherent thought, but no ability to communicate it.
Which of these should I believe about you?
Help! My ideas are being criticized? It’s the exact same level of harm as being killed and cooked, which makes the metaphor totally apt!
Someone save me from the horrid, horrid criticism!
Travis I believe that everyone has a right to do what they want as long as it hurts no one else. I think that the band Havok says it best.
Cut the rotting branches of government that stop
The people from having meaning today
Stay out of my business and keep to yourself
Got to do things my own way
Minimizing freedom with your rules and regulations
A never-ending hunger to control
Choking out the life of your own population
Abusing the power you hold
I believe that survival includes food and shelter. I’ve lived on 8 dollars an hour before and was able to pay for both.
Rusty:
Do you have a rational basis for your opinions @109?
Did you arrive at your libertarianism by researching various political ideologies and looking for evidence as to their success/failure rate?
Something tells me you are not a single mother.
Can’t you just go back to being blunt and honest? Here, I’ll help:
Liberturd: – “I don’t care about the welfare of people other than me”
– “People are suffering? But I’ve got a job and I am doing fine, fuck em”
– “Other people exist that have needs? How does that effect ME, ME, ME?”
rusty shackleford:
Especially when “my own way” involves profiting off your poverty.
Hey! That’s the American Way, so shut your pie-hole.
There is no success and failure rate because there never has been a truly libertarian country. America in it’s early beginning, particularly under Thomas Jefferson was quite close. Under him the people and economy thrived and he did it without income tax, welfare, or medicare.
Monster
To be honest Iv’e already covered this (I feel like I’m facing an army) but in my opinion it’s never my job to hold peoples hands. I help my family, and I help my local area by volunteering at the community center. Now notice I VOLUNTEER to help them. If you pointed a gun at my head and told me to do the same work I do for free at the community center, I’d be pissed.
Rusty:
A disagreement of opinion?
We’re all supposed to just sit back and discuss our views cool and calm. Rationally discuss political views and policies that affect people. In a general sense. No need to think about any *actual* people you know and how they’ll be affected. Nope. Discussing our opinions is done abstractly.
Fuck that. If the policies of libertarians were enacted, many people would be severely screwed over.
The libertarian that says “Libertarianism doesn’t mean “freedom to not starve” ” holds a viewpoint that is disgusting. My disagreement with someone holding that belief is going to be a lot more hostile than a disagreement over the best type of vodka.
.Rusty
How does the Libertarian version differ since this actually describes the current status quo?
Your depth of political thought is best expressed with a song? Sad news Rusty, this is not a Jack Black movie.
Please explain why we should respect the views of an ignorant fool who is completely unaware of how government makes their society possible
Rusty:
I don’t think you understood what I was asking.
Once more, with feeling.
You have this opinion about libertarianism. From all indications, you feel it is an effective political ideology–perhaps the *most* effective. That means you feel it is superior to other political ideologies.
Did you engage in any research to arrive at that conclusion? Did you explore a variety of political
ideologies to determine their success or failure rate before deciding libertarianism was ‘it’? Why is libertarianism superior? What evidence convinced you?
Clearly rusty isn’t as afraid of being called an idiot as he said.
I”m quite certain the exploited Indian populations and the enslaved African people would disagree.
@rey fox, #118:
Thread won.
Tethys
I thought the song simply described my ideas well. I am well aware of how government makes our society possible. They make sure that we don’t hurt ourselves with the evil mind expanding drugs and fight perfectly justifiable wars with a bunch of sand people who just want to be left alone. And well they’re at it, they take out a big chunk of my pay check. Thank the government! (Sarcasm)
@Tethys:
Rusty’s rather telling in his comment that early US constituted something close to the libertarian ideal.
And people say we unfairly malign libertarianism when libertarians say slave nations are the closest the real world gets to libertarian nations.
Tony
I didn’t just wake up one day and think “Fuck it. I love freedom.” It developed over the course of time. I used to be a liberal, because I believe in social freedom. But over time I saw that economic freedom provides the same benefits as social. I took a course on Austrian economics. If you would like an unbiased report on that, here you go. http://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp
Thanks, Crip Dyke. Just doling out the martyr treatment that they so desire.
So, heavy metal lyrics and ethnic slurs. Real “pleasant argument” here.
Crip
That’s why I said there never has been a truly libertarian nation, because while early America was close, slavery obviously took some huge points off the freedom score.
Rusty:
Firstly, FUCK OFF with that racist bullshit.
Also, I guess you don’t benefit from any government service, such as:
No one here is arguing that our government is all sparkling unicorns shitting rainbows, but there are many benefits it provides. Which you show no sign of knowing.
Rey Fox
Yea sorry I forgot I was in easily offended territory here. None of that loud music stuff and no describing the region that people live in got it. So I can’t call eskimoes snow people either then. Joking of course. That actually was slightly racist of me sorry.
Yeah, the early US: except for the slavery, wholesale theft, and genocide, it was a libertarian paradise.
Oh, sorry, I guess it’d lose a few points for those things too. So, only a 90% libertarian paradise.
As long as you weren’t not-white, a woman, gay, trans, or in any other way not a rich, landed white man, but I guess if you’re only going to consider the needs of Proper Humans (the white, hetero, rich, property-owning kind) it was a pretty awesome Big Bag of Freedom. Shame about those other poor bastards, but that’s what the selfishness is for, right? So you don’t have to worry about feeling bad about everyone but the Proper Humans.
Vile, contemptible, sociopathic belief system.
I am entitled to the freedom to starve you to death, because if I’m not shooting you it’s magically not power!
Also, moderator alert, can someone send up the squid signal? The unapologetic racism just got a little too thick in here.
Self-Made Asshole,
But of course we shouldn’t hold a gun to peoples’ heads and FORCE them not to own other people as slaves right? We wouldn’t want to hold anyones hand, would we? People should VOLUNTARILY not own other people.
Freeeeeedum!!!!!!!!!
Fire service
Law enforcement
Military (For actual national security only)
These are the ones I believe cannot be provided by private services.
Oh My God. Rusty actually linked to Austrian economics from the von Mises Institute. Dude, there is a good reason everyone here but you thinks they are a laughing stock. Its because austrian economics has literally no basis in reality and has been proven to be a disastrous way to structure a countries economy.
But back to your post at 121. That chunk of money that comes out of your paycheck- all 30% at most- goes towards making sure you have police, firefighters,and other emergency personnel available to help; a metric fuckton of infrastructure that you use daily; making sure the food you get at the store isnt a poisonous mess; and many thousands of other beneficial things, at much cheaper prices than they would be if private, that you have never even thought about.
Monster
We could have bought the slaves like literally every other developed nation in the world and then have freed them, but no that would’ve been much to civilized. What does that matter though I’m not here to play captain hindsight.
rusty,
Fuck you.
No, you are here to play selfish, racist shitbag. And to prove the OP’s central point.
It’s not “easily offended territory” you douchebag. Slurs are not tolerated around here.
Those “sand people” you were talking about?
Those are human beings, assclam.
They’re human beings with every human right that you have. Like everyone else, they deserve to be treated as such, and not dehumanized.
The low levels of empathy in many libertarians illuminates much.
Exactly things I actually need. So why don’t they cut off the 70 percent that they use to pay for useless crap.
Tony
I do pity them. Troops from our country come and blow them up and then wonder why they attack us. I used the words sand people because I didn’t want to say Islamists or Arabs. Then I would have a different shit storm on my hands.
Rusty:
You disgust me.
Being proud to say “I got mine, fuck you”…makes my blood boil.
Empathy?
Compassion?
Are these concepts foreign to you?
Government should stop paying for services *I* don’t use??!!
What about the people that depend on those services? Goddammit, look beyond your own nose shitheap.
Are you aware of how stupid you sound? Other people might need different things. Wow, what a novel idea, eh rusty? Why don’t you stop and think for a
momenta few decades, then come back and tell us if you have yet discovered that you are not the only person on this planet.Oh, and until you start apologizing for and walking back your proud racism, FUCK YOU, will footnote every one of my posts to you.
Fuck you.
Rusty:
If you’re waiting to dazzle us with homophobia, transphobia or misogyny, just go ahead and do it now.
Tony
It’s not my job to pay for your cake.
Only in the opinion of an highly arrogant and utterly ignorant bigoted fool. Sane and caring people see the need for those items.
Tony
I believe that all homosexuals have a right to marry and do as they please. I don’t discriminate between genders, races, or religious affiliations. If I like you I like you, If I don’t I don’t. I called them sand people because they live in a sandy climate. I really didn’t even realize that it was a racial slur I thought it was just a funny name for them. So Yes I was ignorant, and I apologize.
Is this dang water still not up to a boil yet? Damn, it is hard to heat up enough volume to actually hold your huge fucking ego.
Fuck you.
So you avoided using the actual accepted racial/national terms in favor of “sand people”. Christ, you really are stupid.
Monster
You seem like a smart individual and it’s unfortunate that I have offended you with my differing views. I suppose that I’m sorry.
rusty shackleford @ 98:
(bolded for emphasis)
Funded, I assume, via voluntary donation?
Could you elaborate?
Too stupid to live.
I propose we steer this topic towards the question posed in comment #82. Libertarians: Stupid, or sociopathic? I mean, now that we’ve definitively established libertarianism as the “I don’t WANNA do my chores” temper tantrum of political ideologies.
Fox
Yes Canadians are snow people, Americans are concrete people, Australians are tree people. I fail to see how this is offensive and to be honest I’m not sorry. I was just pretending to be in hopes that we could continue on with a somewhat interesting political debate.
No, you see, libertarians of rusty’s type believe that government and laws should be there. They just don’t want government to have any way to enforce said laws.
Anri
Yes you seem reasonable and non hostile so please stay that way. By that I mean Law enforcement. You could sue him for not paying you. I’m not an anarchist, and I believe courts are there for a reason, along with police (Although they hold way to much power) and fire departments.
RS, proving that liberturds are ten parts arrogance, and ten parts ignorance. And not ever showing anything other that vapid inane opinions, non-sequitur slogans, and ego, ego, ego.
Rusty the Racist Assclam:
Any evidence for this belief?
Your selfish ideology holds that government shouldn’t dictate to businesses who they have to serve to. So, strip away the Civil Rights Movement. Strip away advances for women and queers. You want massive numbers of people to suffer.
vaiyt
Thank you.
Rusty
You have acknowledged that slavery is bad, but you still have not grasped the full scope of human suffering and environmental exploitation that made Jeffersons economy run san income taxes.
That wealth was literally built on the backs of real peoples, and their graves if necessary.
A true understanding of the politics of Jefferson might possibly mention such things as the Louisiana purchase, the massive amounts of aid from France, Benjamin Franklin, and the theft of the land/genocide of its native inhabitants.
I’m sure now that I have mentioned all these historical details Rusty will act as if he knew of these things all along. It’s just that since he doesn’t actually care about anyone else he cant be arsed to actually think these things through. Far easier to just take some angry lyrics as your life motto and blame the government for all ills.
You define “useless crap” as “things that I, personally, don’t think I need” and you wonder why we see you and your ilk as egocentric sociopaths.
Tony
Yes sadly some people own businesses won’t let some people in there stores, and because it is there property, they can dictate who is allowed on it and who is not. The goal is to help them understand there ignorance so that they are ok with living with different people, not to force them to as that simply creates more tension.
Rusty:
This is a rude blog.
Don’t expect many to be non hostile to you after the things you’ve said.
Of course the right of the already privileged shopkeeper to discriminate trumps the right of the already oppressed minority not to be discriminated against. Because minorities don’t need to buy goods – we don’t need their stinkin’ money in this economy, no sir.
They can go somewhere else! Of course if every shopkeeper decides to bar them, it’s their own fault for being different, am I right? Because it’s totally a choice to be a minority. Right.
Tethys
I know that evil runs rampant throughout the course of time, there is still discrimination today and there always will be. Jefferson actually ended the import of slaves and yes, early America did kick the Indians off there land. This was wrong.
CaitieCat @ 130
Squid signal up, thanks.
Monitor Note
The Rules
Rusty:
Rationally convincing huge numbers of people that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc is wrong is superior to government enforced anti-discrimination laws?
I’m sure you’ll show the evidence of that in 3…2..1.
Here I was telling you that I invented this new law about the defenders of libertarianism always coming along to demonstrate how stupid it is, and presto! Rusty Shackleford!
Sociopath at #159,
Coming from the racist shithead who is explicitly not sorry that xe uses slurs like “sand people”. Forgive me if I prefer enforceable civil rights protections.
Tony
I’m used to blogs where people discuss Ideas freely without being judged (no not just Libertarian ones) and I thought that because this was called free thought blog It would be no different here. I did say a few things to try to intentionally piss people off after I realized what type of place this was I admit. Let me assert my views. I believe that federal government should be extremely limited, providing national security, and binding the states together, I believe state governments should make a large majority of the laws, and I believe that local governments should help people in need. I said in an earlier post that it’s not my responsibility to take care of anyone but me. This was sorta half trolling half truth. I believe that people are good enough on the inside to help people without being forced.
Rusty:
Are you trying to win the award for Pharyngula’s Last Flaming Asshole of 2013?
‘Early America’ did far more than kick the Indians off their land.
PZ Myers
You try arguing with 7 people at once. It’s pretty hard especially when you start out trolling and then try to actual argue truthfully.
Tony
Tony do I have to type out the history of the Goddamned world for you? Trust me, all they teach you in public schools is “Fuck the founding fathers they were dumb racists” that was my history class to okay? We took the same one.
Rusty @167:
Huh. You don’t know what ‘freethought’ means. Color me completely surprised.
There’s a reason I’ve been asking you how you arrived at your political views.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought
You see the above definition of ‘Freethought’? It doesn’t mean “blog where any damn thing between your ears is welcome to be discussed and will be treated respectfully”. Nor does it mean “every opinion shared is of equal worth”.
Have you arrived at libertarianism as a result of logic, reason and empiricism?
Where’s the evidence for your odious views?
I’ve never tried arguing a stupid point from a stupid position with 7 people at once, that’s true.
Maybe you should stop? You might be used to forums where no one calls you on your inanity, but this isn’t one of them.
Don’t count me as one of the people “arguing” with you. You haven’t said anything yet that merits an argument in return; as such all you have gotten is contempt and mockery.
Fuck you.
Rusty:
If that’s the conclusion you came to, we most certainly did *NOT*.
Since my earlier question was apparently a bit too much for rusty, here’s @167:
It’s Freethought blogs, not free-from-thought blogs. Thinking about an idea is making a judgement on it. If you don’t like the way your views are faring under criticism, get better ideas.
(and, pet peeve: please, if you are writing in a public forum, learn the difference between ‘their’ and ‘there’.)
That’s called trolling, and it’s bannable by the rules.
But that’s not my call to make, just as well.
…but presumably binding them in ways that don’t include consistent enforcement of laws, okay, do go on…
…why is that? Why do you assume state governments are superior to federal government?
So that presumably poorer locations with poorer populaces will provide the least assistance, because the kids trying to grow up there… deserve it?
Does the history of the world bear out that belief?
Assuming one is not in the majority, that it.
just to repeat some, delivery of:
safe tap water
electricity
natural gas
safe sewage disposal
safe garbage disposal
recycling
all come above military
Rusty:
Wait…what?
You started arguing?
Truthfully at that?
Where?
You still haven’t put forth a coherent political ideology and shown why it it superior to others. You’ve been making assertions cupcake.
Not arguments.
(And “they’re”).
PZ Myers
I started out just trying to ask people to be more tolerant of other ideas. I asserted some of my points expecting an argument, but instead all I got was attacks on my personal character and profanity. I do not believe that liberals are stupid, I do not believe that my word is the end all say all, and I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. That would be silly. I just wanted to toss in my two cents, and by mistake I set of a hornets nest full of very hateful people. Also some of my arguments do sound silly yes, because I had not time to thin them out as I’m arguing with a large group of people who all strongly dislike me. I’m sure your a fine person and would love to have a nice debate with you.
Rusty “the asshole” Shackleford.
oh well, what the hell
the injunction to refresh before posting is never out of order
rusty shackleford:
So, is being arrested an initiation of a type of force? Seems like it is to me.
Force is necessary for the maintenance of society. It just kind of works out that way. It’s just that in an honest society, force is recognized for what it is: the enforcement of the norms of society. That is: we as a society allow the state to impose rules by force to maintain society. Libertarians like to pretend there’s no such thing as lawful force, except for the imposition of contract rules. So, when you are born with the full benefit of society behind you, too young to enter into contract law (assuming libertarianism recognizes that some are too young to enter into contract law), what supports you? Maybe, the assumed contract of society? Or, as we like to call it in the liberal world, the social contract? Or should we just let you starve?
So yeah. There’s a societal force that’s in play. Whether it’s in the social contract that provides you with protection from your birth to your death, or in the enforcement of contracts between grown (and consenting!) adults, it’s nice to know you have force behind you to back up your place in society.
It’s nice to see you like to disguise it behind contract enforcement. It’s the least (no! Literally!) you can do.
rusty shackleford (#159)
Yet, here you are proving the utter futility of trying to persuade horrible, ignorant, hateful people to be decent, informed and considerate.
Anri
I believe that states are more proficient because the smaller the group of people, the easier it is to give them what they want. If I try to answer all your questions I’ll have aneurysm. If you would like more of your questions answered go search up videos of Gary Johnson as he is much smarter than I could ever pretend to be.
Rusty
We are discussing how Jeffersons economy was built on the labor of slaves and the theft and genocide of all the resources of the natives. A person with a sense of intellectual honesty would admit that Jefferson was not a Libertarian and it was a really stupid assertion. Further, they would not compare state-sponsered genocide with discrimination.
So fucking what? He still owned slaves, profitted from those slaves labor, and used them for his sexual gratification when it suited his purposes. He was not a god and he still wasn’t a fucking libertarian.
How big of you to acknowlege that this is immoral. Perhaps you could take into account that the economic “gain” of Jefferson was a direct and intended result of human trafficking, theft and murder, and not because the USA was a near libertarian utopia.
idiot
p.s. their, there, they’re are not interchangable spellings of the same word. Please learn to use these words properly before you attempt another discussion with the adults.
Rusty:
You made assertions provided no evidence for them.
You expressed your opinion, yet when questioned you cannot even why or how you arrived at that view.
You haven’t tried to even defend your views. It’s as if you think they’re perfectly valid, despite having no logical, rational, empirical underpinnings.
Again, you’ve not been arguing.
Avo
Arresting someone who stole something is defense, not force. There is a big difference.
Noyd
Are you on my side because I could use help.
oops:
FTFM.
Tethys
I don’t even fucking remember why we are arguing about Thomas Jefferson but here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
Look in the general findings section.
Rusty:
What the actual fuck?
rusty shackleford
current Indians are still kicked off their land.
They are not dead, you know.
—
I think you’re playing a game with their/there/they’re.
It’s a stupid game.
Tony
I arrived at this conclusion when tax season came, and I realized, that I was paying for other people to be lazy.
Chigau
I’m not playing the grammar game tonight, please don’t test me. It’s not there land anymore ok? Two hundred years has passed. If you believe that it is still there land, give up your house right now and let an Indian family live in it.
rs:
Sorry: rs is only responsible for the first sentence. After that, it’s all mine.
Rusty:
http://www.alternet.org/what-america-would-look-if-libertarians-got-their-way
Avo
I think you’re really over thinking this. Here’s the non aggression principle. As long as you done not steal, hurt, murder, or commit fraud, no one has the right to commit aggression against you because you have done nothing wrong. Once you do one of these things, you forfeit that right.
rs:
What is theft?
Rusty:
Oh, well then you must have some proof that your taxes are going to pay for people to be lazy.
Who are these lazy people?
Where can they be found?
How do you know they’re lazy?
What evidence do you have to support your belief?
Tony
This is what America looks like when liberals get there way
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/31/nsa-iphone-spy_n_4519968.html
The difference is one is unproven and one has happened.
Rusty
I am attempting to fill in some holes in your education, in hopes that a better understanding of Jefferson, and some history will help you to see that libertarianism is not a viable or moral position.
Tony
How about my aunt? Or my neighbor? Or the people who live in government housing driving SUV’s?
Tethys
And yet, without men like Jefferson we might still be redcoats, or we might’ve ended up like Canada. It’s men like that who refuse to be screwed by the government for the sake of “the common good.” Who gave us freedom (even thought it’s been partially destroyed. in the past 50 years.)
rusty shackleford (#187)
But people have been trying to help you understand your ignorance this whole time. It’s going as well as trying to persuade bigoted store owners to voluntarily let the targets of their bigotry into their stores. The point is, you are right now proving why we need laws to prevent discrimination.
Yeah, this one always gets me too. Read someplace recently where it would take like 25% of ***all of the gold ever mined***, just to cover the national debt. So.. If you then add it every dime owned by every country in the world, every dime held in some offshore account, etc., you would have about enough non-fiat money to what? Give every poor person enough “gold” to buy the scrap of paper that their Big Mac came in? There literally isn’t, and hasn’t been for decades, enough gold to “cover” the value of the money we use, never mind all the money that isn’t in circulation, because its sitting in some multi-billionaire’s bloody bank account. I really don’t think they have a damn clue just how much gold there is, in reality, never mind how much money is, technically, in use today, or how they total, and completely, fail to line up with each other in anything like a 1:1 ratio.
Rusty:
Really?
Your link dealt with the US governments power to violate the privacy of its citizens.
My link discussed the *multiple* failings of libertarianism.
Yes, the US government has much to answer for.
A government run by libertarians would be much worse.
(read my link, you’ll understand)
Rusty Shackleford @various
When did “early” America end? 1830? 1890? 1973?
Currently, I am unemployed. I pay my bills through a combination of private loans (at a truly disgusting interest rate) and federally-subsidized low-interest loans that I’m eligible for because I’m a full-time student. I also collect unemployment insurance (mandated by the Federal Unemployment Tax Act of 1976) and SNAP benefits.
I’m a nursing student, for the record. Especially given the dire shortage of nurses nowadays, unless I fall over dead on my way to my graduation ceremony (this time next year), the government will have a nice return on its investment in me.
I dare you to call me lazy. I dare you to say that the help I’m getting is wasteful and unnecessary.
http://www.alternet.org/what-america-would-look-if-libertarians-got-their-way
Oh, and:
Stephen Harper and Rob Ford aside, Canada seems like a rather nice place to live.
Some of my best friends are Canadian, after all.
Tony
So don’t you want to help me stop agencies like the NSA and TSA and help me fight for gay marriage, and drugs, and endless wars?
(same link as #208)
Rusty, how do you answer these criticisms of libertarianism?
Tony
My aunt was on unemployment benefits and decided not to get a job because of them. Now she’s in trouble. Rightfully so. This makes up about 50 percent of people on unemployment benefits. (Don’t deny it you know it’s true.)
Tony
Who cares what Rand Paul said? He’s not a Libertarian anyway.
Tony
I’ll argue the points anyway give me a minute.
Citation needed
Rusty:
You cannot honestly be asking me this question.
After every response you’ve gotten from me.
Yes, I want the illegal activities of the NSA and TSA to stop.
As a gay man, yes, I support marriage equality (not gay marriage, but I don’t expect you’d understand the difference).
Yes, I support an end to the war on drugs.
Yes, I support an end to wars the US has instigated.
However,
I don’t want an end to regulated corporations.
I don’t want an end to the Civil Rights Act.
I don’t want an end to non discrimination laws.
I don’t want an end to the many services I–and millions of others— benefit from as provided and maintained by the government.
We may agree on a few things, but the core “I’ve got mine, fuck you” tenet of libertarianism repulses me.
So the system is working the way it’s supposed to, is what you’re saying? She lost her job, was on unemployment, can’t show that she’s trying to get another job, and so will lose that particular benefit?
Rusty:
Fucking provide a citation you goddam pissant.
Avo:
Why, I’m glad you asked, rusty! Theft is a breach of a societal convention, in which we agree one person might possess an article rather than share it!
Here’s the deal: force is force. You might try to disguise your intention to use force, whether it be behind the enforcement of property laws (“steal,” as you say) or breach of contract laws (another popular libertarian use of force). But it’s still force. “Defense” is something society agrees upon. One person’s defense might be another person’s murder. (Ask George Zimmerman.) So no. You can’t just say, “It’s defense, not force,” because defense is force. It’s just force used in a societally-approved way.
So, how would you like to continue this discussion? Would you like to cover the ways in which the state is allowed to use force, or would you like to discuss the ways in which the state is never allowed to use force (in which case, you are on your own if someone takes something you think is yours)?
1. My aunt was on unemployment benefits and decided not to get a job because of them. Now she’s in trouble. Rightfully so. This makes up about 50 percent of people on unemployment benefits. (Don’t deny it you know it’s true.) Also, you have to realize that the government does not produce money out of thin air, it has to take it from people to give it to others.
2. Competition is not that hard to explain. If two restaurants offer burgers, and one has better and cheaper burgers, I’m going there for a burger.
4. The things that you can outlaw on private property are as follows: theft, and violence without being provoked as a store owner has the right to defend himself against robbers. Prohibiting some people to come on your property which you own is not aggression, it’s just being a dick.
Avo
States may initiate force against people who have initiated force unprovoked. Why do I keep having to explain this?
Rusty – repeating an assertion doesn’t magically make supporting evidence appear.
Tony
I’ll provide a citation if you say please and refrain from insulting my character.
rusty – nobody’s forcing you to provide citations, we’ll just think you’re a puffed-up arrogant asshole with nothing to stand on and no ability to form a coherent argument if you don’t.
My aunt is on social benefits because she is mentally ill and not capable of being gainfully employed.
What shall we do with her?
She’s not lazy.
—
“50 percent of people on unemployment benefits”
[citation needed]
Chigau
Why don’t you take care of her? Oh I’m sorry that would require you to do work instead of the American taxpayer.
rs:
Really? That’s your defense?
What if I don’t use force to steal your stuff? What if I just walk in and take it? What makes that force?
Do you really think about your arguments, or are you just repeating what you’re told?
rusty – nobody’s forcing you to provide citations, we’ll just continue to think you’re a puffed-up arrogant asshole with nothing to stand on and no ability to form a coherent argument if you don’t.
I’m sure you’re distracted, carlie, with the evening’s occasion and all, but I’m pretty sure you were missing a couple of words there. I’ve suggested what they might be above.
CaitieCat – oh yes, you’re right. Thank you.
You seem to be assuming that Chigau does not work, is not helping their aunt, and would be capable of supporting their aunt to the level that she needs, Randy. Why is that?
I also notice that Mr. Shackleford skipped right past my challenge to him as to whether or not I’m “lazy” and a mooch on the system…
Avo
Avo force does not always mean Physical harm. It means that you, in some way have hurt me in a way that I cannot avoid. Hurting my feelings would not be committing aggression against me. But taking all my stuff or punching me in the face would be.
Rusty:
There are other countries on planet Earth…
Bwahahahahahahahahahaaaaa!
If you can’t figure it out, the level of disdain I have for your character prevents me from being polite to you.
rs:
You have not answered my question. How does taking something you have necessarily harm you?
Carlie
Fine, the non aggression principle is wrong. You should be able to take things from people whenever you want for your own benefit. You happy?
Avo
I no longer own that thing and will either need to buy a new one, hurting my financial status, or go without one, hurting me because I know longer can use that thing for whatever it does.
I go get a beer at the bar and this place explodes. I have some catching up to do, but I did see that little mention of Canada. I really, would love to hear more about how horribe it would have been to turn out like Canada. We really are poor, horrible, miserable oppressed folk up here.
Wow. Simplistic, binary thinking.
Who would have thought that?
Happy New Year, everyone. Even rusty (with his name stolen blatantly from King of the Hill).
Me, I’m going to bed. I’m not gonna force any one of you to do likewise (because that would be an extension of force). But I hope you all have a wonderful and gratifying year.
Even rusty.
Travis:
Pull up a chair. I’m your bartender for the night. You may need a few brews to deal with our resident libertarian asshole.
I’ve been thinking, really. You’ve got:
(1) Stephen Harper
(2) Rob Ford
(3) Justin Bieber
(4) Poutine.
But the rest of it looks nifty, all told. I can’t even say that the weather’s that much worse, coming as I do from upstate New York.
rusty shackleford #226
My aunt is 1200km away from me.
and I don’t think American tax-payers would want to send their HardEarnedDollars™ to Canada.
Me? No. I’m the one demanding a citation for “50% of unemployed workers are lazy and would rather be on unemployment than getting a job”. Also waiting for you to respond to whether Esteleth falls into your lazy category. And while we’re at it, it would be interesting to know whether you’d avail yourself of unemployment if the need arose. I know plenty of libertarians who have had no problems sucking off of the public teat, as they usually call it, when it’s their turn to be in need, and somehow twist it around in their own minds to declare themselves special and it’s ok for them to.
Travis
Actually I don’t mind Canada. I don’t even remember talking about it. I’m sure I did though, my issue is that you only gained your independence officially in the 80’s. When you were quite clearly independent much earlier than that. Canadian’s are pretty great actually.
Finally, rusty, here’s something to think about (seriously think about):
You are arguing the circumstances under which state force is valid. That’s it. Defense is force. So if you invoke defense, you are invoking force. I hope to never have to explain that again to you.
So. Where does the discussion go from here?
1. Under which circumstances is state force justified?
or:
2. Is state force never justified, and you can not call me if your TV is stolen?
(Yeah, I stacked the answers. Sue me, if you think that kind of force is justified.)
Esteleth, [an error occurred while processing this directive] #241
(I was forced to use your whole ‘nym because it’s awesome)
Don’t be dissing poutine.
Poutine done right is food of the gods [the sound of your own arteries clogging is a feature not a bug].
You’d think someone so in favor of hard work and against handouts would be eager to earn respect by supporting their arguments (such as they are) with whole lists of citations instead of begging for our leniency and good opinions.
Carlie
I don’t have a citation because it’s an assumption that I’ve heard stated and there is no way to measure it. To be honest I believe it’s more like 30 percent not 50. I don’t know what esteleth said. I have been unemployed before, and I lived off money that I had saved like a financially responsible person until I found another job.
Chigau, I was raised eating horseshoes.. I’ll diss poutine as much as I damn well please.
(Also, I’m glad you like the nym! :D)
Goodnight and Happy New Year to Avo/Nigel
I still have one hour of 2013. I suppose I should get some wine since I doubt Rusty is going to become interesting, or produce one coherent tenet of libertarianism.
——
I am amused at the examples of libertarian ideals in action as cited by actual libertarians.
Jeffersons presidency? I imagine the holes in rustys schooling included Manifest Destiny.
Maybe his schooling was fine but he is actually just a lazy student? hmmmmmm
Noooo I borked my html! The link is supposed to go here.
FFS, Randy, do Ctrl-F. Or scroll up to comment #207.
A. Noyd
I would love to but
1. I’m not an expert I used to try to ignore politics and it was only until this June that I got to fed up with bullshit and decided to take a stand. I’ve always been a libertarian but before I didn’t really care any more than the average person. Therefore I don’t have list of citations. Then again I do.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/
my gob is officially smacked
You’re saying this after you said:
Do you not see the problem with the trustworthiness of even your own opinions as you have stated them?
#207, here.
@Rusty:
Ah, I see. We’re fixing the error of sourcing a figure rectally by citing a new rectum. That should go over well.
Avo
That’s the anarchy vs limited government argument. I chose limited government because I realize that anarchy doesn’t work
States can use force when: Something is stolen from someone or violence is committed against them.
rusty – citations mean that when you make an assertion, you can back it up with evidence. That doesn’t mean “here’s a list of all kinds of things that may or may not have anything to do with what I said”. That means that when you state something factual, like “X percent of people who are in category Y have characteristic Z”, you provide the evidence where that was measured and came up with that result.
Rusty:
Seriously. Stop talking. Go educate yourself on libertarianism. Ask yourself, genuinely, “is my belief in and support of libertarianism rational? Is libertarianism a political ideology based upon evidence? Is my support for libertarianism based upon evidence? Does it stand up to scrutiny and criticism? Has it been put into practice? If the US was run based on libertarianism, how would that affect the population?”
You have a belief you’ve provided no foundation for. You haven’t cited anything to support the efficacy of libertarianism. You haven’t even argued a coherent point.
I’m left thinking you’ve glommed onto this ideology based on no evidence.
Did you know that one of the criticisms of theism is the belief in things for which there is no evidence?
Crip
Would you like to try arguing with 6 people at once? It’s a headache man I’ll tell you. I’m not trying to be hostile towards anyone on this forum and everyone on here seems ok. I’m not really the best representative of the party and in fact I’m one of the worst possible because I’ve never done anything like this before. That being said, I think of at least done a decent job stating my arguments.
Esteleth
It aten’t just you
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_butty
Happy New Year
Tony
Look man, I know I might come off as stupid to you but, I’ve never tried doing anything like this before. I’m not a writer, a philosopher, or a politician. I believe that big brother has no right to encroach upon people private affairs, and that it has way overstepped it’s constitutional boundaries. If you would like to debate this with experts, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/
All I ever wanted was to have a fair discussion without being attacked. If you read through all the posts, you will see that I have never attacked anyone and that this starting out with me just asking for tolerance. I expected more tolerance from a group of liberals. Besides we agree on a lot of things, so why can’t we just try to work towards: ending useless wars, ending drug prohibition and gay rights.
It’s just writing on a page. If you don’t refresh, it sits still for you. It’s common practice to respond to a lot of comments at once, just working through to the point you’re at, before submitting any response. If you like, you can tell people that it’s going to take awhile to work through them, and usually then people will slow down/stop and wait until the next time you post.
Carlie
I don’t even remember what we were talking about okay? I don’t have time to right an essay. I don’t see you providing any statistics either.
Carlie
Oh that’s actual good advice, thank you.
Wake me if RS says anything not said by the other liberturds who have posted here almost continuously since April ’08. I’ll be getting a good nights sleep. He can’t say anything new WITH EVIDENCE.
rusty – what do you consider to be a “fair” discussion? This is a blog that is in a freethought network, and is largely populated by people who think in an evidence-based way. “Fair” in this arena means that if you have evidence and present it, that will be granted full consideration. What counts as evidence is fairly broad, including anecdotes (within certain boundaries), but evidence does have to be present. Uninformed opinion isn’t considered to be a valid point for argument. Yes, that is different than what you find in a lot of other places. It may seem rude or cruel, because you’re being told that your opinion doesn’t really matter. But for the sake of argument, it’s impersonal – it’s the distinction that for most things, there is evidence available one way or the other, and it needs to be used to inform decisions.
rusty shackleford
You can save yourself some trouble if you just address the arguments,
don’t think of it as 6 people, we are a hive-mind.
(who dropped out? it was 7 earlier)
@rusty shackleford
You don’t have to remember what you or anyone else said in this thread, you fucking moron. Just scroll up.
Also, here’s a list of citations proving horses can talk: http://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/
Rusty
No, you have been quite muddled and its clear you don’t really know the fine points of various political schools of thought.
You have stated that you are a libertarian, but have failed to describe what that entails other than not caring about anyone else.
The system of gevernment you actually support is known as a liberal social democracy. In this model, personal freedom is highly valued while simultaneously using the power of acting and spending as a group/government to provide some common services and infrastrusture to all members for the betterment of society. ie, roads, libraries, electricity, etc….
/the more you know
RS, it took me 15 minutes when I first heard of liberturdism to reject the idiotology as morally bankrupt selfishness.
Please show me where a first world country has used liberturd ideas for a 30 year period in the last century.
That is called evidence. Your opinion is dismissed without evidence. Any fuckwit can have an opinion. Those people worth listening to can back up their opinions with third party evidence, like from here: Google Scholar.
I approached this blog completely the wrong way. Many of the blog sites I go to are places where Ideas are argued upon, but most of the time both parties leave happy to live with each other. I now realize after looking at the about page that this is a rude blog, so it’s the opposite of what I’m used to. Also keep in mind that I’m not an expert. I hate both the republican and democrat parties and think both have miserably failed in office for the past 50 years and would like to return to our constitution. I hate it when some federal goons a thousand miles away meddle in peoples affairs saying that they know what is best. I especially hate it that the government is using the term “War on terror” to turn America into 1984. I also don’t agree with things like healthcare or welfare because I believe that charity and local communities have the responsibility of helping the poor. If you disagree with me, fine. More power to you. I think the author of this post said something about how this article perfectly describes me and maybe it does I don’t know. (Like I’ve said a thousand times, I’m not the captain of the libertarian debate team so saying that this proves his point about all libertarians isn’t really fair.) But I think that I made at least a few valid points. I’m sure that you all hate me but I’ve actually had fun doing this and it’s taught me that I’m going to need to clarify my arguments quite a bit if I’m going to convert anyone. Thank you all.
Rusty
Tethys
I don’t think the government should provide any of those things. I believe they should provide: Courts, law enforcement, and the military. Maybe roads to but those could be done privately.
@Rusty:
If you note, people aren’t trying to assert a unifying philosophy here – we don’t really have one. If someone does present a unifying philosophy, we make them defend it.
I get that it can be hard arguing with several people at once. It may feel frustrating that you are certain the information/argumentation to back up the points is available, but that you aren’t able to express it. That’s what citation is for. It’s to help you so you don’t have to be a writer. It’s to help you so you don’t have to do all the research on your own. It’s to help you so you don’t have to be philosophically literate.
We promise that if we assert things, we are asserting them either a) believing that they are so well known and established that they need no current proof, or b) fully willing to either concede the point or find a source.
What we don’t do is say that “everybody knows” something that is unproven and – by your assessment unprovable as the relevant underlying quantity is unmeasurable – when **we ourselves don’t believe it and think that a number we make up more accurately represents the unmeasurable than some number that someone else invented to represent the unmeasurable**.
And while you may feel under personal assault and think this is contrary to liberalism, in fact liberalism asserts that people should be granted benefits of doubt, but nonetheless judged by their actions where clear, in their context. If people here don’t like yours, find no redeeming context, and then judge you by them, that’s not illiberal.
Crip
Thank you that seemed like quite a reasonable statement and I will try to get better at arguing with large groups of people.
rusty shackleford
No one here hates you.
In a couple of days one will remember you.
Rusty,
Please start by educating yourself about the positions you are supporting. Vague assertions and free floating anti-governmental paranoia are not a clear political stance.
I think you may find that libertarianism is very short on pragmatic real world applications.
Rusty:
Why would you think that?
Stupid, eh…I’m somewhat inclined to say yes.
But…no.
I don’t think you’re stupid.
I think you’re an empathy deficient asshole who isn’t concerned for the well being of anyone besides yourself.
I keep asking you *WHY* you have these beliefs, yet you offer no justification.
Take for instance your above belief about ‘big brother’.
What is the justification for your belief?
Maybe you don’t understand what I’m asking (or why). Perhaps this will help:
I believe that women are human beings, entitled to the same rights as all other humans. In practice, however, women are quite often treated as unequal. Across the world, women are denied the right to make their own reproductive choices, denied the freedom to move as they please, dehumanized and subjected to sexual assault, denied positions in government, and so much more. As such, I embrace feminism–a movement that seeks full political, economic, and social equality for women.
Why do I believe that?
I take as a given that All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Here are some examples of the lack of equality held by women:
Here are 10 examples of gender inequality.
I’ve given you a belief that I hold.
I’ve offered the justification for that belief.
I’ve provided supporting evidence to show that it is reasonable to hold this belief.
This is not one of those places. As cited in the page definition: this is a rude blog. We don’t do namby-pamby kumbaya shit with bigots and pathological narcissists. Here, nobody needs to mince words and pretend that people who want a society where starvation is treated as acceptable collateral damage in the name of Freedom are welcomed with their views. You cry about our lack of politeness, but guess what? Your position is impolite by definition. Nobody here is willing to have a nice chat over tea and scones about whether the poor are really people. Fuck you.
Does anyone have a handy ice pack? My head is sore.
Kids, don’t headdesk more than 5 times in succession.
Rusty:
This is *another* example of a belief you hold. Can you justify why you believe this? Is there any evidence that charity and local communities can handle the needs of the poor?
http://articles.philly.com/2013-05-02/news/38960249_1_charity-hunger-special-supplemental-nutrition-program
Threadrupt, on two glasses of champagne
Okay I have made it to comment 107, and thus far I have learned that libertarians believe it will always be the other guy who starves, never them, and they are fine and dandy with this, because freedom.
Comment #113: I have also learned that under Jefferson, people (that would be white men, natch) thrived without welfare and there was no such thing as poverty. Never mind that even were that true it was because of slavery, not libertarianism.
#121: I just learned that Iraqis and Afghans are called “sand people.”
#godknowswhat: Wow you guise did you know that everyone has exactly the same needs as one white middle class dude? Consider me schooled. Oh wait, that wasn’t on the list, was it.
Also, it’s totes okay to call entire countries full of people by the first natural feature which pops into one’s mind, so long as you add the word ‘people’ on the end.
Comment #159: Wow I just learned that public businesses are private property, and as such, business owners have the right to discriminate. Sorry, minorities, you’ll have to drink from the lake until we can convince the non-minority people who are well off enough to own businesses that it’s not nice to leave you thirsty just because they hate the fuck out of you. Hope you can wait several decades.
ANoyd @182: WIN. I offer you my last internet. It is dented, but trusty and true.
Comment #192 forward: Having bridges is lazy. People should learn to swim if they want to cross surging waters. We also seem to be back to starvation always happening to the other person, never the libertarian. Must be something to do with the 50% of people on unemployment being too comfortable making not enough money to live on to go look for a minimum wage job that won’t pay tem enough money to live on.
#220: I wonder how Rusty feels about pollution? It also seems that everyone with a sick family member has unlimited time and funds with which to care for that person. Or, they could let them starve, that’s always a fine option.
#261: providing citations is HARD.
(aaannnd, refresh)
#272:
I am curious about this idea of private roads. How does that work? Do they run on a toll? Like if I am poor and I need to get from here to there but I cannot pay the toll, can I use the road anyway, and if I am barred from use of the road is that defense or force? If I am forced (oh look, force) to walk across rough terrain because I cannot afford to pay the toll, is that an impingement upon my freedom to get from point A to point B, or is it that I now have the freedom to go for a vigorous hike? Do I have the freedom to pay all my grocery gold for road tolls and then starve because I can’t pay for my groceries? Who decides who gets to use these roads, and who prevents the road owners from deciding that they don’t like me so they will raise the price? If it’s an emergency and I need to get my kid to the hospital but I am denied use of the road because I didn’t pay, is the road owner responsible for the death of my kid, or what?
It seems a lot simpler to just pay taxes, but maybe that’s the drink talking.
Tony
I though I was done with this but I feel the need to respond. I’ll start with your comment saying I’m an empathy deficient asshole. I don’t believe in not helping the poor. Just because I don’t think the government should force people to do it doesn’t mean I don’t think they should at all. We didn’t used to have things like welfare or medicare and we were okay. Take this interview with Ron Paul.
Q: Let’s say a healthy 30-year-old decides, “I’m not going to spend $300 a month for health insurance.” Who’s going to pay if he goes into a coma?
A: Well, in a society that you accept welfarism, he expects the government to take care of him. But what he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would have a major medical policy.
Q: But if he doesn’t have that, and he needs intensive care?
A: That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks.
Q: Are you saying that society should just let him die?
A: No. I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid. In the early 1960s, the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals. We’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. The cost is so high because they dump it on the government, it becomes a bureaucracy.
As to your sentiment that woman are not treated as equals, libertarian philosophy does not discriminate. I have never denied that woman are mistreated in any of these posts nor has it ever been brought up. This has no relevance. As for the issue of abortion, it doesn’t matter if I think abortion is right or wrong (to be honest I find it morally disgusting for a woman to murder her unborn baby) I think it should be a states issue. If a woman wants an abortion, it should not come in any way, shape, or form from taxpayer money as some people find it morally wrong.
As for your final point, the reason that charities do not fix issues like poverty, or helping people in a natural disaster is because they don’t have to. People count on big brother to come in and fix the problem. If they didn’t, people would unite together and help them. That I have confidence in. Besides right now the biggest issues for libertarians are not any of these things. If we took office the first thing that we would do would not be to stop support for natural disasters. The plan would be
1. Balance the budget
2. Take all our troops home from all countries and end our global empire.
3. Abolish the federal reserve.
4. We would not eliminate Income tax right away because we are so far in the whole.
5. Abolish all unconstitutional agencies, such as the tsa or nsa.
6. Slowly begin to wane people off of welfare.
7. Once we are finally out of this huge whole we’ve been dug into we would severely cut taxes and eliminate all agencies and powers not dictated by the constitution.
8. One solution I came up with to help with poverty and things of the sort is a voluntary tax. Sorta like a national charity. Then maybe we can continue to provide some minimal welfare, and help those in natural disasters.
Does that plan really seem so bad?
onamission
Honestly an advanced libertarian society would be able to have private roads, but we are not there yet nor will we ever be and that’s fine. In my mind roads are one of the few things that I really don’t mind the government providing. As long as it’s the state government, as is mandated by the constitution.
Damn.
I wish I could get a hushfile for my iPad.
rusty @ 183:
So, which state gets to determine how much trash ends up in the Mississippi River, or the Gulf of Mexico, or Chesapeake Bay? Which state agency’s study should we take as the accurate count if they differ (as there’s no federal agency with oversight, of course.) If the state upstream is happy with twice the level of river pollution as your state, who’s right?
Or, if you prefer: if a state actually decided to start enforcing it’s ‘belief in god’ requirement for public office, what do I, as an atheist, do? What if the majority of voters in the state extend it to employment as well? Even better, what if there’s no law, but an informal agreement among the major employers to only hire people of a given race, or religion, or gender?
You are so bad at following direction, rusty. Tony asked you, way back at #142,
And you have been holding onto this little nugget all this time,
Has anyone told you lately that your views are repugnant?
” I also don’t agree with things like healthcare or welfare because I believe that charity and local communities have the responsibility of helping the poor.” – rusty
And that sums up the Libertarian delusion about society. Totally disjointed from reality.
“I think you’re an empathy deficient asshole who isn’t concerned for the well being of anyone besides yourself.” – Tony
And that sums up the best and most honest truthful response this universe can ever provide.
rusty shackleford @ #282:
I’m glad you have confidence in that, because the historical record shows you’re deeply, terribly wrong. Take the clearest example: during the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was no social safety net beyond what could be provided by private charities. And the system was horribly inadequate at helping people with issues like poverty (both due to lack of resources and because they often focused on helping their own). Similarly with the Depression, particularly in terms of Hoover’s policies aimed at fixing it.
I’m all for the upbeat belief in the Inherent Charity of the Human Spirit and the Power of Communal Fellowship, but good intentions mean squat when you don’t have the resources to help starving people.
rusty,
If private charities were adequately meeting the needs, why were the social safety nets ever created?
Current programs, take SNAP as an example, are not adequate, and yet are being reduced. Have private charities stepped up proportionally to the loss of benefits? I will share your confidence in private charities when I see them fund and print their own SNAP cards to be distributed to all those who currently receive foodshare benefits.
Hey gang, rusty pulled the “North could have bought the slaves” myth and no one called him on it that I saw. There is a lot of misconceptions to get through, I know…
Anyway what I find most interesting about Libertarian ideas (US Libertarianism specifically) is they just plain don’t understand why the world has to be so damn complicated. If you just regress everything to some (largely mythical) past state everything would better (according to their many many assumptions about humanity and life etc). But you can’t keep the law simple and have it both just and functional at the same time. That would mean actually making no decisions at all, or wielding almost royal power (I suppose that’s a good way to look at it). But having only King/God Constitution is not just or democratic. We did this stuff already, that’s how we got here. Circumstances change, power moves around, new things come along, decisions are made, precedents are set etc. I think all the libertarians, if they got there impossible wish of a return to the mythical past, it’d change back to something as messy as now within 50 years. Sure the details would be different, but they’d be just as disappointed.
So it’s basically an ignorant and simplistic position, and pretty much willfully so. Their approach to human psychology is a good indication of this; Give people things and they will lose all desire, all will and become merely ‘dependent’. That’s not how it works. That’s basically thinking so primitive it might as well be Iron Age animal husbandry. People are entirely variable on this matter. But I guess that’s the point. They do not intend to create a world of plurality, vibrancy and complexity but one where people are forced, indirectly so they don’t have to take any responsibility, to believe and behave exactly as they think they should – an ideology imposed through scarcity, indifference and law so absolute its like hasn’t been seen in centuries (they don’t -think- they want this, but it’d be the only way to get what they want).
They’re essentially anti-democratic authoritarians, and what’s fascinating is they can avoid thinking that this is so. It’s actually built into the philosophy to shun that level of introspection, for that would involve attending to the “social” and that is a no no.
I started typing a few sentences earlier, but thought it pointless. Since you asked nicely though, what really stood out to me about that comment is that it suggests that slaveowners deserve compensation for their “property,” as if it’s an eminent domain issue. Anything to avoid facing the reality that the entire concept of “property” is arbitrary, and in fact capitalism could never exist without strong state control.
If rusty (or anyone else) is actually interested in why “free markets” are a bad idea even from a libertarian perspective I’d suggest some Kevin Carson
Rusty:
Were we?
What do you mean by ‘ok’?
Was the poverty rate lower than it is today back during this time you speak of?
Were the health care needs of children, women, and seniors more efficiently met during this time you speak of?
You’ve made more unevidenced claims.
With no evidence, your opinion is dismissed.
…
The point of my comments about feminism has flown clear over your head. I was not making a point with regard to libertarian philosophy.
My statements about feminism were designed to show you the importance of explaining your position as well as providing a rational, logical, and/or evidence based justification for having said position.
Rusty:
With such confidence, surely you’ve evidence to support your belief. So pony up.
You believe that without government assistance, people would step up and provide all the resources for those in poverty.
This belief is based on what evidence?
If you have inadequate evidence to support your belief, why do you have it?
If private charity is so much better at providing for the needy than public welfare, why is it that today only 10% of seniors live in poverty, while prior to the introduction of social security it was over half?
Also, how is collecting social security or unemployment insurance “lazy” when you have to pay into it to even qualify?
I notice that rusty does not include ambulance services in the things government should provide even though it is something that was provided very badly by private enterprise back in the 60s and and 70s and it now provided much better by governments – usually municipal.
I notice many parallels between libertarians and anti-vaxxers.
The first libertarian to show was citing sources that actually contradicted his arguments.
Is like the anti-vaxxer statement that we survived just fine without vaccinations in the past (forgetting that parents buried half their children).
There is the preference for a kilogram of cure over an gram of prevention.
And of course a heavy reliance on anecdotes and rectally sourced statistics. (At Respectful Insolence there was a libertarian claiming that 100 million Americans were on welfare).
I assume rusty considers it a gross violation of his rights for the government to tell him how many ducks, deer, moose, bears, bald eagles etc he can shoot, trap, poison etc.
Leaving it up to church folks to care for people works so well.
Just take a look at all those women and children who were enslaved in Irish industrial schools and places like Magdalene laundries.
Here, take some time and read this, rusty shackleford:
http://goldenbridgeinmate39.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/twisted-sisters/
—
I agree with all the other points people made against relying solely on private charity.
Example:
You live in a small, poor town where some large industry the whole town was depending on failed? Well, that’s just too bad that there are suddenly so many poor people there, but there’s just no one to help all of them.
It sucks and all, but I guess some are just going to have to starve.
Oh, they can move? Sure, it’s not like they have a lot to pack. There’s the lack of car issue, but I guess they can walk. And beg on the streets, of course. I’m sure all you libertarians don’t have anything against beggars filling up streets, and you would happily give them some money. Benevolent private charity and all.
Right?
People can slip through the cracks even where government safety net exists. When it doesn’t, they depend upon chance and mercy. Both are rather shaky things to have you life (and maybe lives of your kids) depend on.
Yeah. I’d be one of those “lazy” people to this lot. I’m a single mum on a pension. They drop the pension when your child reaches 3 (used to be eight, but they figured they’d “encourage” us to go to work instead of being proper parents) and give you the bare minimum unemployment benefit, which is so meagre as to not even cover the weekly rent. Let alone groceries, clothing, bills, medication and anything else necessary to live like a human being in this city. Highest cost of living in the country.
I’m supposed to get a job with a three year old child and no cash for child care, work clothes, transport or anything else. I don’t even drive now – fuel is expensive and living skint is very stressful causing a lot of anxiety. Oh, and getting a job when you’re a single mum with few qualifications and not-very-flexible hours? HAHAHAHAHA. Right, mate.
Fuck off, worshippers of the magical free market woo. Fuck off all you arseholes who think that it’s easy and fun to live off government payments. It sucks. I WANT a job, but my job is my son right now and it’d be irresponsible of me to do anything else. In an ideal world I’d like to wait until he was four to go to work because I feel that’s a better age to let him stay away from me for longer periods and sleep better at night, but I don’t have a choice there. It’s been decided by people who think I’m a leech.
A hearty FUCK YOU to anyone who doesn’t give a shit about the lives of real people with real problems. We’re not just fucking statistics, thanks.
Yeah, but rusty shackleford is confident it’s not going to happen to him, so what’s the problem?
Priceless. Rusty just knows what a society he admits has never existed and will never exist would provide. I think you found this imaginary society up your arse, Rusty – it’s clear that’s where your head spends most of its time.
RS
Yep, no responsibility whatsoever for the public good. That is the definition of a sociopath. And why your idiotology is morally bankrupt, and you supporting it, you.
Probably the most egregious failure of “the market” today is the failure of pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics. We are now on our last line of defense against several diseases (including tuberculosis). Pharmaceutical companies would rather come up with drugs to treat uncurable diseases so they will have customers for life. This will be a catastrophe in a decade or so.
Markets aren’t magic.
Here’s one example, rusty. You’ve just made a claim: people were ok before welfare and medicare. Now, think about trying to convince someone that’s true. What would make them believe it? What would support that claim?
First, you have to define what “okay” means. Pick a few measures – life expectancy, number of epidemics per year, deaths due to preventable disease, number of people living in a defined level of poverty, etc.
Then you’d have to know what those measures were for the general public before welfare and medicare were in place. You’d need sources for them, collected by reputable entities you can direct others to.
You could then argue that the level those measures showed are “okay” in your perception, and you’d have to back up why you think those levels are okay (such as “50% in poverty isn’t a problem, because it’s been shown here and here why economies function fine at those levels”, for instance).
At that point, if you really wanted to be thorough, you could anticipate the arguments you’d get back. Some would be “but we’re much better off now because all of those measures are better now”. For that one, you’d need to know what the current measures are too, and be prepared to say why you think that change isn’t significant. Another might be “the economy’s ok, but quality of life is worse”, and you’d have to be ready to say why you think one standard is better to use than another.
Proper argument is hard, and people aren’t used to it, and that’s why the proliferation of talking heads on the media is so frustrating – nobody knows how to do it well any more.
Enopoletus Harding@35
So it was blatantly dishonest of you to claim that libertarians are among those groups’ biggest enemies: your “worst enemies” are those who actually do something to prevent you getting what you want (in this case, leftish governments and trades unions – both of which libertarians hate). Also, you never answered my question about who the Koch brothers give such large amounts to libertairian think tanks and propaganda. That would be because you have no answer consistent with your lie about libertarians being the enemies of rich exploiters.
It’s odd in conjunction with your bloviation about how the government getting involved in healthcare (with Medicare) caused the increase in health costs in the USA. The evidence is absolutely clear that among rich countires, the USA has the least government involvement in healthcare, the highest costs, and – in most respects – among the worst outcomes.
I have a small point about ambulances.
A few years ago, our government decided to implement a federal quick ambulance system. Our healthcare is heavily municipalized, which has its benefits (mainly getting healthcare resources tailored to local needs) but that also means it depended highly on the financial means and competence of local governments. There were private services available… for the people who could afford them… and good luck being in their coverage area.
Let me just say this. Even with the rampant corruption and incompetence on our government, the system proved to be MASSIVELY more effective than anything we had before. So effective, in fact, that the hospitals themselves are having problems catching up. In your view, such an improvement is bad because Big Brother! Welfare Queens! Or whatever buzzword you feel like bandying around.
One of those federal ambulances just saved a little kid that drowned in our pool yesterday. We’re in a massive housing complex, nowhere near a hospital As I said, they’re hella fast.
People who are out of breath or food need those things quick. Waiting to check their wallets or berate them for not working hard enough will just cost lives. That’s what matters, rusty. Where you see statistics and abstraction (Starvation and Freedom, dueling like mystical forces in the aether!), we see real people who have needs, and who suffer and die. I hope you never suffer the ignominy of being under starvation, or being denied urgent medical care. That’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
I see you’ve all been keeping rusty busy. I thought this was funny:
But…but…what if one restaurant has better & more expensive burgers, and the other has cheap but lousy burgers? What if one offers more meat at a lower cost because their sources are dodgy about sanitation? What if both companies pander to natural human cravings for fat and sugar and race to produce the gooeyist, bloodiest, drippingest burger, ignoring protein quality? What if the cheaper restaurant gets its prices lower by exploiting workers desperate for a job, any job? What if both burger suppliers are dependent on a larger meat industry that meets demand by building factory farms and making animals suffer? What if I want a kebab or a curry instead? What if I’m vegetarian? What if I have celiac disease? What if I want a healthy meal, but my kids really really want the restaurant with the clown and the “free” toy with their food?
I could go on. Competition isn’t that simple. I also note that rusty had set up a scenario where he was free to choose between things he wanted — classic privilege.
PZ Meyers
That’s where competition comes in. If you disagree with a restaurants policy, you don’t have to go there. No one is forcing you to go to McDonalds or any chain like that and I’m sure there are plenty of vegan restaurants out there to satisfy people like you. That’s the point of competition, you market your product to a group of people who want it and try to make your product better in every aspect possible over the competitions. As for saying that I come from privilege, what if I told you I have never made above 35,000 a year and that I get by without help by (get this) making smart decisions. I save money so that if I ever lose my job, I can remain self dependent and I didn’t have a child before I could afford one. I don’t buy expensive things, I rarely eat out, I don’t have a big tv. I’m fine with all this. Your a professor, I’m sure you have much more money than me.
Things are, of course, always more complicated in the real world than in the wet dreams of libertarians. There are ongoing disputes about the effects of Pinochet’s economic policies, some of which are dealt with here.
Chile was in a good fundamental position due to factors in place before Pinochet’s monetarist experiment: land reform in the 1960s made export-led growth feasible, and the literacy rate was the highest in South America. The experiemtn led to a catastrophiv banking crisis in 1982, after which policies were moderated. The fastest growth since 1984 was under the social democratic governments of the 1990s:
Let’s see: minimum wage, increased social spending, tax increases. Does that sound like a libertarian set of policies? GDP growth rates have been close to the Latin American average since 1997 (see one of the graphs at the link), but Chile remains highly unequal. The Chilean people have just elected a leftish President and Congress, committed to reducing inequality, by thumping majorities. Time for a new bout of military dictatorship, torture and murder in the name of libertarian-style “freedom”, Mr. Harding?
RS
This is an utter non-sequitur, meaning it doesn’t follow your arguments. In fact, you have no arguments, which require evidence to elevate them from mere opinion, and have nothing but unsupported opinion. Unsupported opinion is dismissed around here. Which is why you are continually expected to support your opinions with third party evidence, not inane non-sequitur arguments from ignorance.
Stop talking, start pointing.
Nerd
Here is my evidence for competition. I don’t know why I have to argue that competition is a good thong, but here you go. http://www.forbes.com/pictures/emjl45fhdh/education/
rusty shackleford,
People being exploited by the burger place are supposed to depend on
1. good will of people who will stop going to burger place in protest
2. that enough people will stop going to the burger place to force it to either close up or starting paying the workers better?
Do you also believe in fairies?
Because hoping for 1. takes a hell of a lot of good faith in humanity. Good faith that disappears completely when it comes to people working for the government. Which is something I honestly don’t understand.
Even if this worked, it could take years to raise people’s conscience enough. But you would rather see workers exploited than a regulation agency ensuring they have decent working conditions and pay.
Unbelievable.
Anyway, rusty, have you read that article about industrial school? You could use some education about reality.
You don’t argue, you claim. Competition can be good for business. Unless you are the business being bankrupt by predatory practices by Walmart. Your claim is falsified.
Besides, government isn’t a business, and shouldn’t be considered one. Different aims, needs, and uses. You haven’t shown that social programs don’t work. Still waiting for your 30 year span of liberturd economic policies by a first word country in the last 100 years. You fail to ask yourself the right question. Which is, if liberturdism is so good and works so well, why doesn’t any first world country use it? Answer, it doesn’t for for a stable system…,.
–Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett, 1993.
Extrapolating this to housing, other items of clothing, foodstuffs, transport, etc, is very easy.
Interesting to see ambulance service come up. Here in evil ole socialist Canada ambulance service is commonly provided by private firms. For example MD Ambulance, which provides ambulance service in Saskatoon, was just acquired by a Nova Scotia firm. http://www.thestarphoenix.com/Ambulance+sold+Nova+Scotia+based+company/9256008/story.html
Nerd
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/does-welfare-diminish-poverty#axzz2p9PJl7ms
Theres my evidence.
As to why no governments have tried a system like this, I don’t see many zoo keepers letting animals out of there cages and back into the jungle. Does that mean animals are happier in the zoo?
Rusty:
I’ve tried-and clearly failed-to explain to you that you are *not* arguing. Carlie has also tried (with way more patience for you than I can muster, I hasten to add).
You’re making your opinion known through assertions. Assertions are not arguments. Simple repetition of your opinion doesn’t automagically turn it into an argument.
You have not put forth a coherent viewpoint and provided evidence to support that view.
Competition might be a good thing in the right context.
It does not magically solve everything.
It definitely does not generate better outcomes when there’s no enforcement of fair opportunities for everyone.
Rusty:
Your link provides no citations either.
It is merely one person asserting their opinion. Where did Mr. Baetjer get his information from? Is the source of information reputable or questionable?
A google search for does welfare reduce poverty turns up numerous results. One of those is a scholarly article (ask Nerd why this is considered a reputable source) which seeks to answer the question at hand:
I hope you’ll read the article.
If you do, please note the 6.5 pages of references. The author, Lane Kenworthy, did not present unsupported opinion.
vaiyt
Everyone does have a fair opportunity in the free market. If you really want something, work for it. Seems like the definition of fair.
there’s a funny thing: We can actually ask humans. We can meassure their quality of life
sauce
My own opinion of libertarians and libertarianism can be summed up thusly:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged . One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
― John Rogers
All my interactions with well meaning and sincere libertarians keep reinforcing this quote. Libertarianism simply is disconnected from reality as much as Marxist Communism or Italian Fascism.
Everyone has fair opportunity? So the man born to wealth who was sent to the best schools and who has access to a high-quality library, high-speed Internet, and the email addresses of a bunch of smart and connected people in the relevant field has an equal shot of succeeding as the woman born in poverty who is illiterate due to the lack of a school that would admit girls and who lives in a hovel and has never heard of this “computer” thing?
Wrong. The history of capitalism shows time and time again that making a better product or service is hardly the only or even the optimal strategy to acquire maximum profit.
Honestly, Shackleford, I cannot decide if you’re so stupid and uninformed about the state of the world as to believe that there is equality of opportunity, or such a sociopath that you know that there isn’t and don’t care.
I also cannot decide what is worse.
I’ve seen National Lampoon’s: European Vacation, I know not to trust the words of anyone called Rusty.
Sorry, you were expecting an actual argument to counter piss shallow expositions of greed and shitty understandings of economics? Oh no no no.
Louis
Rusty:
Citation please.
You’re making assumptions and treating them as truth.
Inequality would not magically disapper if the US became the libertarian paradise of Ayn Rand’s dreams.
rusty shackleford
O really?
Let’s make it very simple.
Mike and John both want to buy a car.
Mike is a surgeon. He went a bought a new car.
John is a waiter. He’s been saving money, but things are rough. He’s working all the time, but just when he saves up a bit for a used car, something happens. The boiler breaks down in winter. His wife gets hit by a car and there are medical expenses. There’s this school trip and their kid has never been on one because of lack of money. Pipes in the bathroom break and flood half the apartment.
Life isn’t fair, honey. There’s no need to try and make it more unfair by building political and economic systems on delusions.
rusty,
Your wonderful “free market” produced during WWI when conscription became necessary in the UK a population of young – 18 to 40, as I recall – adult males 40% of whom were entirely unfit for any sort of military service. Australia experienced similar problems.
Why were they unfit? Chronic malnutrition and the long-term effects diseases we now prevent, all made worse by poor housing. This free market alone notion is not a viable plan, as Adam Smith himself would have been the first to tell you.
Esteleth:
I think sociopath would be worse.
Yes, Tony, but you’re suffering from empathy poisoning, in the Randian school of medicine.
In my experience, the people who bleat on about how there totes is equality of opportunity tend to be cis white men with money.
They then, if prodded, assert that the reason why TPTB are mostly cis white men with money is because such people are “naturally” better at succeeding/smarter than everyone else.
Which jut makes me conclude that the reason why they’re opposed to affirmative-action programs that benefit PoC and women, and why they’re opposed to welfare and other programs designed to give a fair shot to everyone (an actual fair shot) is because they know deep down that such programs, if allowed to work, would prove the lie to the notion that cis white men with money are naturally better than everyone else.
And they can’t have that. They can’t admit that those people are worth as much as them.
What if you can’t afford to go somewhere else? It’s ok for the restaurant to poison you because it’s more profitable? That has actually happened, you know. That’s why we have things like the FDA, because it’s so cheap and profitable to put pollutants in food to stretch it out. Think that’s exaggeration? There are a few recent examples listed here.
What if the other place is just as cheap, but refuses to serve you because of your skin color or religion?
What if all of the restaurants are in collusion and all charge the same price that you can’t afford?
What is good for competition is often not what is good for the individual or the society.
Of course! The children of billionaires and the children born to unemployed crack-addicted single mothers in slum housing both have the same chances to prosper by their own efforts!
Oh, wait…
This reminds me of one of the scenes in the Herzog film about texting and driving.
When they talked about the woman who is paralyzed because she was hit by a car. The driver’s insurance ran out after a small amount of money but the medical bills the family faces are huge.
This is how fair the market is. Sure, they can probably always send the bills to the driver who is not going to pay for them because they can never earn that much money.
So the bills accumulate.
In the libertarian world that is just OK. Because hey, free market and everything and people just take their own risk and such, after all the driver’s economic life is ruined, I tell you, ruined. Courts of Arbitration! Buzzwords!
Compare to countries where a car needs to be insured by several millions and where even in case the driver drives without one the victim’s healthcare is covered by public healthcare, apparently the worst kind of “zoo cage” there can be.
How does that work? Magic? Good feelings? Equal opportunities don’t arise just because you really wish they did.
Sports are fair. In sports, everyone plays by the same rules and starts equal. The market is not fair. Some people get a headstart, others have to jump extra hurdles, others are breaking the legs of the other players instead of running – and your solution is to remove the umpires.
Absolutely clueless. This is an excellent example of flight from reality.
RS, your liberturd opinion piece isn’t what this book is, showing that government programs work by academic experts.
Speaking of movies, the liberturdians always make me think of The Hunger Games with small changes. Instead of the totalitarian government, they have the God of the Free Market and powerful corporations running everything (to the same effect). Children are entered into the Games not because of punishment but like in the poorer district, as a way to buy food.
And liberturds would be totally OK with that, because after all, these people *chose* to enter instead of starve and the God of the Free Market had deemed the Games profitable, after all. I mean, Katniss even *volunteered*!
Greatest dystopian of the past couple of years, and liberturdians want that.
320
rusty shackleford
I loathe you so fucking much. The only people who have a fair fucking shot is white, straight males. You’ve had the leeway to get out of the situation you were born in – it is far harder for women or POC. I’m a white, straight, woman born into poverty. In and out of homeless shelters growing up, etc. I’ve been lucky, so lucky, to get the help I have and make it this far. I know this because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen my POC neighbors and friends get screwed over, looked over and discriminated against. I’ve had the racist fuckers give me looks and whispers because they assume since I’m white, I’m like them. (And they get to continue to think that I agree with them – tacit approval – because I couldn’t bite the hands that feeds.) The victims have no power to fight it because that would mark them as “trouble makers” and “uppity”. Triple fucking screwed and they have kids to feed because they couldn’t get birth control or an abortion. There HAS to be regulation and laws against this shit. To do anything else to accept the status quo.
This, THIS, shit is so fucking wrong. It totally ignores reality and damns people like me for doing nothing wrong except being born – and it’s not like my mother had freedom of options either.
I was fucking born by this shit and am buried by it. Fucking Christ. And I’ve been lucky.
And yes, I say hate. I feel it because this shit isn’t fun or funny. You are causing real fucking harm. You are part of the problem. I may forget you but the status quo, which you support, sustain and further with your words with always be on my shoulders. Take fucking responsibility. Get some fucking empathy. Do some actual research. YOU’RE the lazy fuck who refuses to read, comprehend and apply the wealth of information and evidence.
“Lazy” people on welfare, my ass. You don’t have a fucking clue what its like – all the hoops to jump through, all the people judging, the little you get when you have a full time job doing all you need to do. I’ve met plenty of people who actually live this shit, and not a lazy one was among them.
Fuck you.
——————————————
193
rusty shackleford
I know this was awhile ago but I can’t let it go. So, you’re saying if I steal and hold on to it long enough, it becomes mine? I’m guessing since slavery was 200 years ago that black people are all fine and equal with the white man now? What about how the government STOLE the land and broke the treaties with them? It’s still continuing. Oh, since you’re so lazy let me sum up that link for you – White supremacists are buying land that should, in a fairer world, belong to the Lakota people and trying to set up a little racist haven.
#283 rusty shackleford
This reminds me strangely of the arguments made by proponents of other idealistic society models. e.g.
“If our communism would be fully mature, we would not need to do XYZ anymore.”
” If everyone would be at least as communistic as us, we would not have to to do XYZ anymore”
” We call our-self socialistic for the time being because we do not know how long it will take to implement true communism.”
etc. etc.
What you probably do not understand when you say government is, that the government is not an abstract entity to rule us. Those are the people that we chose to organize our society for the better of all of us. There are historically grown structures those people employ to fulfill this duty and yes, those are far from perfect and many of them need to be changed to adopt to the needs of the people and not to the needs of the politicians and the people who bribe them. In the end, the government is our arm and leg, the parliament our voice and brain and the courts are our consciousness.
And yes, we should have roads, let’s build them and keep them in a good shape. But that’s just my opinion.
If your constitution does not fit your society anymore it is strongly advised to revise it and to create a new one if necessary. Look what Iceland did recently. They asked their people what kind of constitution they want to have, in what kind of state they want to live.
The current constitution of the USA was written by people who lived in a world that was limited by the speed of a horse carriage for transportation needs and limited by the speed of a horse for transmission of information. That is not the world anymore we live in today.
Actually, no, we already tried that. What we got was a) people only maintaining the roads between the businesses they owned, and not giving a damn about anyone/thing else, and b) substandard practices, which make the existing, falling apart because we would rather build useless aircraft than fix bridges, infrastructure look like a utopian paradise. But, actual history never seems to be a strong point with libertarian arguments, if it was, they wouldn’t keep insisting that a) regulation wasn’t needed, rather than being a consequence of discovering that it **was** needed, b) that charities could take over social services, while ignoring the blatant failure of charity in all other times/places people had to rely on it, or c) what the country looked like, in all respects, before the silly government got involved and “some” of them tried to fix things so they worked better (before people who claimed to know better immediately started intentionally sabotaging things, to both make said programs look bad, and shift funds to their own pet projects, instead of using it where intended).
The problem is, often, not the “size” of the government, or the existence of the programs. Its a bit like “sports” in schools. Actual, real, research on the subject has found that introducing a sports program to a school is a near absolute, immediate, and virtually irrevocable drain on the resources that are needed for ***every other subject***, but especially any other subject requiring equipment, never mind silly things like text books. Worse, they never pay for themselves, so the lack of continual, large scale, donations to such programs, and the inability of them to actually make enough money to subsidize such things via tickets, or other methods, mean they suck the general funds dry.
However, the “prevailing” assumption is that “extracurricular activities are good for promoting learning, and sports programs bring in extra money.” This is ***exactly*** like government projects. There are huge swaths of things which we know damn well, from prior history, can’t support themselves, do not work as private enterprises, without undermining the general well being of some percentage of the population, etc. But… what actually ends up being paid for, out of the funds needed to run these things, is pet projects, and including, in some cases, sports stadiums, but, basically, a thousand useless things, that a thousand useless politicians imagine will gain their state, or the Fed, more money, but which, in reality, offer no returns, bankrupt the projects, and then just become a drain on resources, get funded instead – and, the worse thing about it… both sides, though the right more than the left, at least for social programs, defund/undermine and/or intentionally break, the things that do work, and are needed, so they can have an excuse to spend the money on one of those, “no actual return on the investment”, projects.
The claim that social programs offer no return on them, at all, is one of the BS lies they use to justify misplacing the money. After all, if they throw a wrench, yourself, into the gears of the clock, it becomes bloody obvious to everyone that the clock isn’t working. If you can manage to do this without the rubes, er.. I mean constituents, noticing that you where, moments before, holding a wrench, all the better, right?
Assuming Rusty’s using the word “work” to mean “labor for pay,” that means that people who are unable to work get nothing.
Which means that
-orphans get nothing
-the elderly get nothing
-disabled people get nothing
-people whose labor is not considered worthy of pay (single mothers for example, whose primary labor involves raising their children) get nothing
Of course Rusty will say that private charity should give them things.
But suppose the private owners of those privately-run charities decide to exercise the freedom Rusty said they should have to discriminate. And these private charities discriminate against a certain subset of orphans, elderly, disabled people, and single moms for reasons like skin color or belonging to the wrong religion. So those people get nothing.
Well, Rusty says: tough luck. They will just have to die.
Don’t deny it, Rusty. You know it’s true.
And that’s why nobody likes libertarians or libertarianism. Except sociopathic assholes like Rusty.
I’m just going second JAL’s post, expletives included.
Clarification: by “orphans,” I meant orphaned children.
The problem with making basic needs dependent on work is that the people most in need of basic stuff generally also can’t work.
The problem with letting private charities take care of the needy, is that the people most in need of charity are the ones most likely to be discriminated against by the rich.
Liberturds offer no answer to both these conundrums. To them, the most shat upon groups in society are acceptable collateral damage.
There’s also a third conundrum: Who’s going to be giving to charity in a society where everyone believes the poor to be lazy in proportion to their poorness?
And yet, despite what Faux News, and a lot of, gee.. this is ironic, libertarians and Rethuglicans, claiming otherwise, such services are, “directly, and explicitly, denied as being covered by government funds”, in all current law. Mind, I think this is wrong, since it also means its not covered when the life of the mother is at stake, whether the fetus is viable or otherwise, but then, the argument always given against covering such cases is always the same sort of black and white, magically thinking, in which such cases are either being “made up”, or “can’t happen”, somehow…
I also second JAL @ 340, expletives included too, and kagehi @ 342 and Sally Strange @ 343.
And I’d like to add this, about hard work: I remember during the latest financial crisis an interview with a hedge-fund operator going on and on about how hard he works, how is in the office everyday at 8 a.m. Well, I think he ought to be put in jail for all that hard work he does. And I think the people who should be rewarded the most are those who have the most important jobs. This is simply my opinion, but the single most important job is teaching first grade (I am not nor have I ever been a primary school teacher) because so much of people’s fate depends on how well they begin to learn to read and write.
We reward all the wrong people.
And so much essential work for the good of all is left undone. And so much other work, no matter how hard you work for it, no matter how much you sacrifice for it, like writing poetry, is never going to make you any money.
I third JAL’s post. As someone suffering from a mental illness, I havent been able to get work in over 5 years. So Rusty, what am I supposed to do since no one will hire me? Am I supposed to just starve to death? Am I to go to the local homeless shelters that force feed me religion and that if I refuse to bow to their ideology I don’t get a bed or food? Do you call that freedom? Are you that naive and ignorant of the realities of how poor, minority, elderly, and/or ill people struggle to live? Are you even aware of something called learned helplessness, how life can shit all over your hopes and dreams, that you can fail so many times, to such a point that you just give up at ever succeeding? No, you have probably never considered these questions.
#283 rusty shackleford:
Okay, awesome, the government gets to keep maintaining the roads for a while. Never mind that each state will now have to somehow do that without any national funds. Now let’s move on to water. Who gets to own that, and who regulates who gets what and how much they can charge each customer? Who cleans it, who pumps it, who inspects it, and what recourses are there for people whose water supply gets contaminated, but are too poor, too ill, or too damn dead to bring a lawsuit? What about food safety? Do we or do we not have the freedom to purchase and eat clean, safe food? If someone has, say, a peanut allergy, do they or do they not have the right to know if there are any peanuts or byproducts in their food before they decide to eat it, or does the free market decide that for them, thereby forcing them to take a risk with their very life any time they eat commercial goods? To take an example from recent history, if there is an outbreak of e coli in the beef or spinach supply, what recourse do the sick and dead victims have? Who or what entity ensures that the manufacturers clean up their act, and what power do they have over those companies to ensure a continued quality product, that people not get sick again?
If nonpayment of debt is theft, are we going to bring back debtor’s prisons? Who pays for that? Will these debtor’s prisons be privatized, and if so, how will they turn a profit? Chain gangs? Does it or does it not bother you that unpaid debt is a problem which more greatly affects those born into poverty than those born into wealth? If not debtor’s prisons, will those to whom a debt is owed be able to take by force the property of the debtor? Does this or does this not impinge upon the freedom of the impoverished to a greater extent than it does the freedom of the wealthy?
I am also curious, if each state is basically its own country in all but name with its own laws and its own, non federally supplemented budget, what is the point of even having a nation? If, say, North Carolina gets together and decides to do away with public schools entirely, what are those who cannot afford private schools to do?
*sniff* I smell serfdom
Pretty much what JAL and Arawhon said. Hell, I’m a cis white dude, I’ve been out of work for a year now, and no end in sight. There’s no jobs going here, or rather there’s a small fraction as many jobs going as there are applicants.
I have read some on this subject. The problem isn’t that they are not doing so, its that overuse of the existing ones may be making it damn near impossible. Turns out, a lot of “promising” solutions have turned out to just not work. Microorganisms are very hardy, they adapt fast, and they often live in what are already highly competitive, and hostile, environments. This means that, for example, targeted treatments, intended to disrupt their internal functions, have often, as in, every single time so far, failed to work, because you can’t get the drug “past” the damn cell wall, to actually disrupt the internal machinery. Other kinds of non-targeted antibiotics are simply derivatives of existing toxins, which are either useless, since they have side effects, or similar enough to existing antibiotics, that there is already a built in resistance to them.
Its not like no one is looking, but, so far, trying to deal with the specific bugs, on a genetic level, has just failed, completely, and there seems to be a finite number of both “safe for the patient”, and, “actually will kill the bug”, compounds out there, natural or otherwise, which are not just slight variation on what we are already using. We may have lost the war, by fighting it in the first place, and the only semi-promising solution, which we know works, is something called “phages”, which is basically a sort of method where by you throw a lot of other, disabled, but competing, bugs at the ones you want to kill, and let them out-populate them, or eat them, or something. This works, but its “highly specific” to each individual cases, vastly harder to figure out, since you need a specialized mix of a dozen different competing microbes, and even worse to test, since you have to make sure they won’t kill the patient, while trying to cure the disease. Despite the widely claimed conspiracy theory that we just are not trying hard enough, the real problem is that we were so bloody successful, in the short term, that we undermined our ability to win in the long term. And, it will take a drastic, unknown, impossible to predict, from existing data, and possibly non-existent, discovery, or a completely novel, new, and previously never seen, antibiotic, to actually solve the problem (which will then be just as bad, a few years later, after resistance to that novel solution sets in again). We just don’t have any such thing, right now, and almost all attempts to engineer specific ones, never mind broad spectrum ones, have been dismal failures.
So, its not actually accurate to say they haven’t been looking. Even less so when non-pharma research has been looking into this, as well, in many places (I somehow doubt the CDC and other government agencies are asleep on the job, and just letting pharmaceutical companies work on this, for one), and running into the exact same failures. It may just be a problem that throwing enough money at won’t solve, no matter how much gets thrown at it.
Nthing JAL’s post. Libertarians and boot strap fetishists seem to think that they got wherever they are all on their own, forgetting every thing anyone else ever did to help them along the way, as well as any privilege they have.
Yeah. I’ll put a number or two on JAL’s point.
I’m on welfare right now, as I found myself unable to work due to the progress of my disability.
This is in Soviet Canuckistan, by the way, the socialist hell where everyone wants to be on welfare because it’s so sweet. Good old socialist Canada.
I’m given, at maximum, 606 Canadian dollars a month. That is about 570 USD (0.94), 655 AUD (1.08), 424 EUR (0.69). (I won’t provide the rest of the currencies the rest of the way, you can do your own multiplying. Freedom!)
Total. That’s the maximum I can get, as a single adult.
My rent, which is a little higher than the cheapest I could get, is currently 939 CAD. In the same building, without the rent control providing my lower rate, the same apartment above me went for 1020 CAD/mo last autumn. I could probably find a true shithole of a bachelor somewhere, definitely with bugs, almost certainly with a slumlord as a rentier, for about 700CAD. If I were willing/able to share, let’s say I could get my rent down to 400 CAD a month. Hell, let’s be generous to our guest and say 300. Maybe I got lucky somehow. My rent is inclusive of most utilities: heat (an important consideration, in Canada, for much of the year), electricity, and water are provided. I have to provide my own phone and Internet.
Since I can’t work outside my home due to my disability, I have to have the Internet. Without it, I’m basically destitute. I work as a translator and editor, so fortunately I can do a small amount of work, when I can find it. Internet and phone – landline, because it’s cheaper than a mobile, and I can’t afford a mobile phone to put on a plan anyway* – cost me 100 CAD or so. My only other expense is one of my medications, not covered by the welfare drug plan, and for which I have to pay 135 CAD/mo.
My food, thankfully, is donated at this point by my friends and chosen family. I am extremely fortunate in this. Without them, I would be maxing out my food bank visits. Why max out? Because they only allow each family a few per month, because there are so many damn families, and so few generous libertarians giving their all for charity.
So my total expenses are 939 + 100 + 135/month. If I somehow managed to get some super living arrangement, I could maybe bring that down to 535. In la-la-pretend-land, but let’s pretend, so we can make the point clearly, how incredibly evil this empathy-bereft “philosophy” is.
My welfare payment is 606. In Pretendland, I have 71 dollars after all my bills/food/shelter are paid for. My city’s bus pass for welfare benefit users is CAD 63/mo. If I had to go to work, now I have 8 CAD for the month. That’s in Pretendland.
In my city, it means I have 939 + 100 + 135 = 1174 outgo. And that lovely 606 income. This is called the problem of “making the ends meet”. Literally. For me, it means “the ends of the months”. If I can make the ends of the months meet, financially, then I’m having a good one.
Ah, you say, but work! Glorious work! That’s the life of reward, not this life of decadent and despondent dependency**
When you can’t spend more than a few hours a day sitting at a computer, it’s not easy to find a lot of work. But let’s say that I have a great month, and I bring in 500 CAD.
My income for the month is 1106! W00t! I’m buyin’ me a fourth CADILLAC! Except, of course, that that’s not how it works. Until last September, when they finally changed it, every dollar I earned came directly off my cheque. So my income, after earning CAD 500 and a nominal CAD 606 of welfare, is in fact…606. In September, they changed it so that the clawback is now CAD200 exempt, and 50% after that. So now, in that glorious month of earning 500 CAD as a freelance editor, I’m all the way up to CAD 956 (606 + 200 + 150).
I can now pay the rent.
I can’t pay for my Internet/phone, nor can I pay for my meds, or (again with the lucky) food. Or transportation.
That’s Realityland.
In Pretendland, I have CAD 956 to spend on my CAD 535 basic shelter/needs, so I’m relatively wealthy at CAD 421 to spend yet. I could even buy some of my own food! I think I’ll get some of that fabulous food rich people are always talking about, what do they call it? Oh, right, “meat”.
But I still need transportation (let’s say CAD 30, and i just won’t go out much, ok? I shouldn’t have any fun, anyway, because if I wanted fun, i’d be “working harder”, that’s fair, right?). So add CAD 30.
Also, I haven’t bought a single new item of clothing in three years. I could use a little dosh to get some of those girly fripperies, like underwear that bends and bras that don’t. Or maybe some menstrual supplies, were I stuck with that particular annoyance. Or maybe some toothpaste! I could do something exciting, like see my first movie in a theatre since…the last part of Harry Potter. When was that?
That’s in Pretendland, of course. In Realityland, I’m left begging my friends for help, Internet strangers, or pretty much anyone and everyone I can hit up.
And even there, that’s a result (as a number of things above) of my amazing amount of privilege as a white woman. The education, jobs/level of employability, money, goodwill, food, friends with ready cash and generosity, skillset to allow me to work while more or less unable to physically, all of that, was handed to me on a platter not generally available to POC, to people with disabilities, to even document-having immigrants or asylum-seekers, to working-class people, to women, to single mothers, et c., et c..
You’re standing, Rusty, on the top of a giant mound of other people, most of whom are underwater, and proclaiming how fine it is and that everyone should just walk on water like you do.
That’s why people are being rude and dismissive to you, when you waltz in with your bullshit talking points from glibertarian bullshit merchants, peddling the old lie of upward mobility to what Comrade Stalin called useful idiots who are predisposed to believe that they, special they, will rise to the top of the shitheap and have a wonderful life, if only the
mudsand people would get out of the way and stop gumming up the works.But sure. We’re not rich because we’re “lazy”, and the system is totally fair, and would be made fairer by getting everything that keeps people like me from being ground underfoot by people like you, out of the system.
Also, fuck you.
* And three-year contracts in return for phones are the kind of sucker deal that make people like us (here including me, and JAL and Sophia above, and a few others I know of whose privacy I won’t break by saying for them) poorer still. Why? Well, what happens when you have a month where you can’t pay the bill, in any way? They cut you off. They charge reconnection fees. If you try to break the contract, you pay the original full price for the phone. If your payment was auto-debit and you couldn’t stop it in time, you pay the NSF fees (my bank charges 40 CAD now). If you go below zero because of that fee, they ding you for an overdraft fee. Et c., et c.. FREEDOM! For the banks, anyway. Since they all do it, how do I keep my money in the libertarian paradise? With a gun I can’t afford, under the mattress I have to share with half a dozen other families?
** Note too, the product of my expensive, and thankfully mostly-state-paid education. I went to university in a glorious time when we thought we were hard done by with our CAD2200/year in tuition. No really. 1987-1992. I was able to access this education because, despite growing up desperately poor, I got a completely free education from the state, courtesy people paying their property taxes. I mean theft, sorry, Rusty, I forgot to whom I was speaking. In my expensively-acquired toff style. To get that CAD2200 (plus CAD 1400 in books; I was in a language/lit/linguistics program, we get WAY MORE BOOKS THAN YOU), I worked two part-time jobs my entire time in university. Until I got to fourth year, and the loans – not grants, but loans – that the government were willing to extend ran out, and I had to take on three jobs, while also going to school full time and keeping honours grades.
Oh, and remember, this is welfare. The disability system is WAY more generous.
Yeah. The basic payment there is 1060, with the same clawback – did you even know the word clawback, before I used it? people like me always do – as welfare, so I’m 454 CAD “ahead”. Remember that in Realityland, without paying for food, I have bare minimum shelter/needs of 1174. CAD 114 over the sweet sweet government teat’s 1060.
Same clawback, so my CAD 500 still turns into CAD 350, effectively. That puts me at a shade over CAD 1500, without paying for food or transportation, and about CAD 350 to spare for those things and Everything Else Ever.
Yep. People are just falling over themselves in this country to quit and get on disability, since it’s so rich a life.
Also, fuck you.
Oops, bad numbers there, it puts me a shade over 1400, leaving 250 to spare for food, transport, and everything else not included in “shelter/needs” above.
I’m riding on the freeway of love in my big Cadillac! W00t!
RS, you just don’t understand economics. I’m sure you are against unemployment insurance. For example, a group, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, that looks at the effect of government policies on low income people. From the section Unemployment Insurance as Economic Stimulus, They say the following:
In other words, providing unemployment benefits stimulates the local economy compared to the out-of-work people people trying to just live off meager savings. Same is true of welfare. Those dollars stimulate the local community, more than just the dollars put in, as those dollars get transferred around the community.
Just want to also nth Just a Lurker, <Dalillama and Arawhon‘s posts.
RUSTY, what about people who simply can not work and who have no relatives/friends who are able to help them? Are they to be left to chance and the mercy of the rich? Because that’s never, in all of history, worked you know.
Libertarians: the new, more fashionable creationists with beliefs just as outlandish and deeply ignorant and bigoted. The Fairy of Equal Opportunity (Rusty, you haven’t addressed this issue either yet!), the God of the Free Market, the Magic of Charity. All of these things are twoo because they want it to be twoo, reality be damned!
rusty, here’s an example of having to make a good argument.
I want to say “and also, giving money directly to someone in poverty has a much greater positive impact on the local economy than giving that same money to a rich person (in the form of a tax cut, for example).”
But I can’t just say that, because who the hell am I and how does anyone know I didn’t just pull that out of my own ass? Damn, now I have to look it up before I say it, or I’ll look stupid. Off to google I go, because it’s a half-remembered statistic and I can’t even figure out where to start looking.
“impact of a dollar of welfare benefit to economy”… nothing, nothing, someone else saying it but not remembering from where, nothing… bingo, there’s one. It’s from NPR, which is ok enough to make me feel solid enough to go ahead and post the comment with that link, but I’d like to be on a little more sure footing.
In that story it says
, so I’ll go add “Moody’s Analytics” to the search to pinpoint it.
Here’s a big paper. It probably has what I need, but it’s a pdf, and honestly I don’t have the time to spend combing through it just for the sake of a blog comment. I can scan quickly, though, and on page 9 I find a table that shows tax cuts giving an impact of $1.03 or less, and increase in unemployment benefits and food stamps giving an impact of $1.63-$1.73. And the study is by the chief economist of Moody’s, which, if I wasn’t familiar with it, a quick wikipedia check would tell me is a reliable economic source. I’m definitely happy with that to support what I was saying, and now feel confident enough to post that comment with a link to the source. And, it was a decent process – it got me to one of the same points that Nerd just cited.
That might seem like a lot of work, but even with transcribing every step of the process here, it took me less than 15 minutes. That’s not too much, given that now I can bookmark that page for use in future discussions about the usefulness of government programs, and given that otherwise I probably would have spent at least as much time or more dealing with an avalanche of “oh yeah? how do you know that? You’re wrong!” comments I might have gotten.
” libertarians believe it will always be the other guy who starves, never them, and they are fine and dandy with this, because freedom.”
Actually, Onamission5 @280, there is at least one exception. The SF writer H. Beam Piper found he could not pay for medical treatment he needed and- true to his principles-shot himself.
It turned out he was mistaken and could have carried on living.
How charity works:
You feel bad for people, so you give them money. But that is inefficient, and you can see that it’s unjust – people can’t just depend on running across you at the time when they need it and you have a few extra bucks.
So some people who care set up a charity organization. This way people in need can come to them at any time, people who want to donate money for the poor can give at any time, and they keep it all in one spot so it’s more efficient and more useful.
They soon realize that it’s then easy to check to be sure that the people needing charity really do need it, and the people donating are then more comfortable donating because they know that it’s being managed well, and they donate even more. Hooray!
But it’s a bit of a chore to remember to donate. Sure, you remember at Christmas and Thanksgiving, but late February is a nasty time of year. It’s cold and harsh, stored cheap root vegetables are going bad, the Christmas gift bills are all due, it’s easy to let it slide, even though the needs of the poor are even greater at this time. So the charity comes up with a good solution – automatic deductions! Take whatever the goodness of your heart says you should donate in a year, and spread it out through the year in easy-to-handle regular installments. You still only need to think of it once a year, but the benefit is greater on both sides – you don’t see a big hit to your savings at once, and they get a regular amount they can count on to help people through the whole year.This is fantastic!
So, to sum up – you have a relatively efficient system, wherein people in need go to an agency and prove that they’re needy. Other people who can afford to help get a specific, affordable amount of money deducted from their account on a regular basis to support the agency and its charity. This is all ok so far, yes?
So what’s suddenly the problem when it’s called “welfare”? That’s all government really is t its core, you know – an efficient system to broker transactions between people according to rules those people feel are important.
I’ve been reading since last night. Good job handling Rusty, everyone.
One thing that often sticks out to me about liberturdians is that they don’t seem to acknowledge the concept of a leonine contract, if I’m using that term correctly. They don’t acknowledge that wealth is very useful to exploit the disadvantaged. If a poor, hard working person has a contract with his wealthy employer who abuses loopholes and one-sided interpretations to screw him out of the worth of his labor, how is the poor worker going to get help? The wealthy employer has more money to spend on better lawyers or even bribes, so a simple ‘contract enforcement’ government doesn’t seem likely to help. Chances are, he’s also close friends with the judge, and if the locale elects its judges, may have contributed to his campaign. It’s bad enough right now.
I think the common comparison of libertarianism to communism is quite apt: It’s one of those ideas that initially sounds workable on paper until you stop to think about how the world really works. It’s the difference between knowing the School House Rocks song about how a bill becomes a law and reading the news about shady back room deals between the CEO of Mega Corp and your senator. Wealthy people often work the system by creating invisible hurdles other people have to jump over.
If I remember the quote correctly: “If men were angels, there would be no need for government.” That makes me want to add a comparison of libertarianism to anarchism. (You’ll probably need the world’s sharpest razor to split that hair.) If everyone was fair, honest, non-bigoted, and didn’t seek to take advantage by manipulating, intimidating, or otherwise unfairly exploiting desperate people, libertarianism might work. But so would anarchy.
Another annoying issue I see all the time is that libertarianism carries with it the insidious illusion of meritocracy. On paper, yeah, in a libertarian society you might expect the most talented individuals to rise to the top of society in as described by Social Darwinism. But nope, that’s not how it works in the real world. Minority children, poor children, girls, and other disadvantaged demographics are commonly told to scale down their hopes and dreams to something they’re “meant” for. They have a harder time getting into good schools as well as finding enough time off work to get themselves a degree. Even if they somehow manage to get a good education, they’re less likely to be hired to fitting positions because they’re not white males from the upper class and thus consciously or unconsciously presumed to be less competent by default. Liberturdians avoid acknowledging the effects of poverty and bigotry on equality of opportunity the same way communists avoided acknowledging that there could be de facto class struggles in their explicitly classless society. People with natural talents can and do fail because discriminatory systems prevent that talent from being nurtured. Racist and sexist liberturdians (well, racists and sexists in general) then twist it backwards into a rationale to deny investment in the resources these people need to develop their potential, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of mediocrity.
rs @308:
rusty’s “sure” about everything! Why? Because reasons!!!1!eleventy! Well, I’m convinced. Not
Or that they don’t even know exist in the first place. That’s one of the easiest to point out, weakest part of the whole idea of unfettered capitalism – nobody has the knowledge needed to make a proper informed choice between competitors. Sure, one place serves cheaper burgers than the next, so you choose it – but if you don’t know that they’re using a carcinogen in their filler that won’t show up until your test results 15 years down the road, how can you even hope to be able to decide whether that’s worth the risk?
I have mentioned this before on another thread, but I am still amused by how strongly, whenever I am exposed to libertarian free market
theologyphilosophy, I am reminded of Littlefinger’s chaos is a ladder speech from the Game of Thrones televised adaptation of the Song of Ice and Fire Novels* – that belief that a sufficiently ungoverned system brings opportunity to those at the top, or at least those who are ruthless, sharp and smart enough to seize those opportunities, paired with the absolute certitude that you will always be that guy at the top/more ruthless, sharper and smarter that everyone else. And of course the downright socipathic disregard for the suffering caused to those trampled underfoot in the rush for advancement. It is almost a picture perfect description of the Libertarian mindset.The biggest point of difference is that the Littlefinger character knows and even openly and proudly admits (at least to Varys) that he is a self obsessed, greedy and power hungry arsehole who cares about nothing and no one other than his own self aggrandisement, whereas some libertarians seems to have genuinely convinced themselves that unfettered deregulation, the gutting of all social security provisions, and the general victimisation of the most vulnerable members in society – all as a sacrifice on the altar of the ‘invisible hand of the free market’ – will somehow create some sort of utopia for all. And that by some alchemy this ‘utopia’ won’t end up looking like Somalia.
Overall, I prefer the honesty of someone who at least has the courage to admit that their chosen philosphy is nothing more than an excuse for a Gorden Gekko-esque ‘greed is good’ mindset to the creeping hypocisy of those who want to wrap their greed up in the flag of some laughably economically inept pipedream of how much better society would supposedly be for everyone if the market were given free reign and the poor were told to sink or swim… with no one mentioning the anvils tied to their ankles, of course.
———————————————————————————————————————
* My apologioes to PZ, who I knows dislikes both the TV series and source material.
The thing is, it’s perfectly possible to be a completely selfish bastard and still support lots of government programs. Consider: If people with communicable diseases are able to access health care, then they are less likely to make me sick. Yay! If we invest more in children and families, we can see a decrease in crime. Yay! If we maintain government oversight of professional licensing, I can be confident that my doctor, my plumber, etc will actually know what they’re doing. Yay! And so on. While a selfish bastard might not feel any obligation to help other people based on kindness and compassion, a sensible selfish bastard will still recognize that they live in society, which means very complicated webs of interconnection and interdependency, and that all but the richest of selfish bastards will be affected if the government is made small enough to drown in a bathtub.
Other commenters have pointed out what history has to say about the effectiveness of the private and non-profit sectors in providing those services. I would also invite all selfish bastards, richest and otherwise, to consider what history says about societies with small, hyper-wealthy elites and large numbers of desperately poor people with no prospects. Hint: France late 18th century, Russia early 20th century.
I believe that big brother has no right to encroach upon people private affairs, and that it has way overstepped it’s constitutional boundaries.
Those words “constitutional boundaries”. They do not mean what you think they mean. Take it from someone who actually studied and uses the U.S. Constitution professionally.
Here is a good example of “why” we regulate, and the sort of mess you get when there isn’t any, or its being done wrong:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/verizons-diabolical-plan-turn-the-web-pay-view-226662
Basically, “common carrier” laws mean that your mail man, or even businesses that do similar work, cannot decide to not ship your product, just because they don’t like you, or your town, or your state, or they like someone else better. You come in with a package, and they have to deliver it, presuming what you yourself are shipping isn’t illegal. The same thing works for “normal” phone companies. They can’t opt to not allow certain things, just because they don’t like you talking about the subject in question. It is, in fact, actually illegal for them to be listening in, in the first place, never mind picking and choosing which conversations their customers actually want to have over their lines.
Way back when, certain railroad companies profited, and helped create huge monopolies, by either refusing to carry goods from certain companies, at all, or by only carrying the goods of whom ever bribed them the most money to carry their products instead. Now.. Verizon, despite the fact that the internet itself has been mostly a “common carrier”, and they run a phone network, which is a “common carrier”, and, sadly, in part, probably due to the success by some idiots arguing that ISPs should not only be able to, but must, somehow “regulate” the content that runs through them, have decided to try the tack of claiming that “content” delivered from the common carrier of the internet, once “transferred” to their own networks, to things like cell phones and other devices, via their own common carrier, are being “published”, and that, therefor, they should be allowed to express “editorial discretion”, and either refuse some content, or charge more for it, especially if its “popular”.
I am sure Rusty can see no problem, at all, with this stupid idea… Because, its not like they will do something like.. deciding to block/raise the cost of political sites they don’t like, or decide to block/raise costs on competing content providers, or decide they don’t like Disney, so block/raise the rates on that, while giving special discounts to something owned by… oh, some subsidiary, or anything “unfair” like that. After all, we can just pick from one of the other, what… 0 cell companies that have the same coverage area and Verizon, thus, the same access to the contents, who will, of course, never pull the same crap on us, once Verizon is allowed to get by with doing it, and which, of course, won’t, say, have to rely on Verizon towers, ever, to deliver the same content (and thus, probably, result in you being double charged, both for it being “unapproved” content, and “outside your cell service’s own network”).
This is, BTW, what also happened in some case with “private roads”, back when we where trying those, and the #1 reason why, for such a damned long time, very shortly after the telephone came into being, that the government both “allowed” a monopoly, and strictly enforced rules over what it was allowed to do, in the Ma Bell days.
But, this is a irony – breaking the “common carrier” concept means 1) making information access more expensive, 2) possibly preventing some access, and 3) granting someone else the right to charge for both a) your content, and b) free information (which sounds a lot like someone charging you to get into your own driveway, and/or to park in front of the “public” library, while leaving the library free). Its not that they shouldn’t charge for the use of the network, its the assumption that they should be allowed to decide, for you, what you have access to, or charge you more, not based on the “amount” shipped (in the same sense that no one gives a damn if its ball bearings, or ball point pens, in a box, just, “what does it weigh?”, when you go into a UPS, thus infringing on your personal freedom, access to information, right to make your own choices about what you see from the internet, and.. your financial security, all, I would think, anti-libertarian concepts, which would piss them off just as much as if I bought the road in front of their house, and then decided to charge them, personally, more money to exit the drive way, on the grounds that I don’t like the color of their car. Its a perfect example of the government not having the guts, or the willingness to tell them to stop being assholes.
Ma Bell was, of course, a perfect example of the opposite – a case where regulation was “overdone”, and stifled growth, but.. the result, to anyone paying attention to all the crap they keep trying to make ISPs do, or insisting they can do, or should do, or some of them would like to do, but, unlike Verizon, who falls into a grey area on the subject, would like to do, at the expense of the public, was, well… creating looters, like Verizon, who, if they could figure out a way to get by with it, would charge you for being connected to their service, while charging the cell phone battery, on the grounds that a “charged/charging” cell phone might somehow being using more bandwidth, than say… one with a dead battery. If they can get by with it, even if its insane, they will, and so the pendulum keeps swinging, back and forth, and one moment the “market” looks like a medieval castle, with the technological equivalent of pigeons delivering telephone conversations, and on the other end of the swing, you have stuff out of Star Trek, but the blade is creeping, in slow motion, closer and closer to the moment went it smashed the whole display of new technologies into scrap. What the libertarian, as usual, isn’t noticing is the poor bastard (i.e. most of humanity) strapped to the table, while the blade clicks down, one notch at a time, every time it swings from one extreme to the next.
Somehow.. stopping the bloody thing from swinging, by finding a reasonable middle ground between rampant greed, with a robust pursuit of new ways to screw the consumer out of what they just bought, and completely grinding things to a total halt, doesn’t compute with politicians, or.. “believers” in silly ideologies (or, am I being redundant?).
I completely agree. I think it’s their unwillingness to escape their profound ignorance that gets me most about libertarians who think that they’re actually acting on some form of moral good. That and the deliberate lying you have to do to make it work.
vaiyt (#324)
Exactly. The real-world example of Japan’s supposedly “miraculous” postwar economic recovery was achieved through government management of industrial expansion and cartelization of major industries. Those cartels limited competition by agreeing ahead of time what features each company would focus on, by sharing R&D, and by carving up foreign countries so only one company would export to a particular area. See, competition is actually quite expensive and wasteful, and Japan simply didn’t have the resources at that point to enable unmanaged competition. So they didn’t, and now they’ve been one of the richest nations in the world for decades.
n+1thing JAL’s post and many many others in this thread explaining exactly how and why libertarianism is both terminally divorced from reality and downright evil. My thanks and respects to all those who – very generously – took the time and trouble to school the two willfully ignorant sociopaths in this thread.
I remember making that observation when reading a thread about Ayn Rand and her fiction. A common thread I sensed was that her posited utopias are only good for Mary Sue omnidisciplinary experts. This lead me to thinking that if we can only combat dangerous, useless, or unethical practices by choosing which product or service we buy, we’d need to research every company and every product we buy in order to trust it. On an individual level and case-by-case basis. This wastes a lot of time on redundant research. In the real world, we have this thing called “division of labor.” We have watchdog organizations, government and non-government, enforce certain standards on producers and do the necessary research for us. We set those up so that we can choose to provisionally trust their judgement and enjoy our lives instead of spending all our time pouring through medical journals or conducting our own clinical trials to make sure the pharmacy’s pills will work as advertised without poisoning us. I don’t have to inspect a restaurant’s kitchen before I feel safe eating there because they get routine visits by the health inspector. I can choose to double-check their work, but I’m free to make that decision, rather than ruled by justified paranoia.
Quacks spout libertarian anti-regulation arguments because a deregulated environment allows them to make a profit on dangerous and/or useless products, knowing that their customers are prone to self-deception (and by making them more so through woo culture). The invisible hand of the market just doesn’t work for fields like medicine where it’s often hard for the customer to decide which product is the best until it’s too late.
Bottom line I came to: Libertarianism undermines capitalism by stripping away any basis of trust between buyer and seller. It brings to mind various detailed methods of trade between criminals, post-apocalypse survivors, hostage situations, and so forth in fiction. They go through the Goldbergian extremes to assure both parties that one won’t just kill the other and/or take everything. And then someone gets screwed anyway.
People have been doing a great job of handling Rusty’s garbage, but I thought I’d just address one of his more horrible comments.
It might surprise you, but there is actually research into these things, and it turns out that on the whole, social mobility is not doing particularly well in the US, especially not compared to welfare countries in Europe. It also turns out that there are a lot of factors which can negatively affect your chance of social mobility, such as your geographic location in the US, what neighborhood you come from, and whether your parents are divorced.
Here is a link to the PEW subsite dedicated to social moblity. Go look at it, and get educated before spewing your bullshit.
Going back all the way to post #38 by Enopoletus Harding
This might be the only not-incredibly-stupid argument for gold that I have ever seen, and it is still pretty dumb.
Using gold as the basis for money is a horrible, horrible idea in an expanding economy like the American (and the world’s in general), since it would lead to deflation. Even with mining, the increase in the net sum of gold would not be able to keep up with the increase in the economy. If you think that inflation is bad, you really don’t want to experience deflation.
Oh, and a side-effect of gold being used as the basis of money, would obviously be that the price of gold would have to be adjusted – i.e. increased by a huge factor. This would lead to e.g electronics becoming much more expensive, since they often contain gold.
I made the claim above that health care costs were cheaper in Europe. One link showing the differential (charts two pages down on my computer).
Kristjan Wager #375
It wouldn’t even do that. As I mentioned to Harding, there were loads of moneychangers around back when gold was a currency, and they took fees for said exchange just the same as now. If there was proportionally less moneychanging going on (which is something I frankly question) then it was because there was less international trade. Since there’s a whole assload of international trade going on right now, there will be a whole assload of currency exchange fees, and that will remain true until a) international trade slows dramatically or b) everyone in the world starts using the same currency. I don’t really foresee either of these happening anytime soon.
Dalillama #377
Well, in some areas, foreign currency was used as local currency. E.g. in Denmark, they used German and Roman coins, as well as local, during the Viking age. This could be a theoretical possibility, if all countries switched to gold and silver (yeah, right).
I wish I could find that Simpsons clip where Moe is at the repo office begging to get the floor (yes, the whole floor) of his bar back, and when told that he needs to pay his bills, replies, “BUT I DON’T WANT TO!” Good summation of libertarian philosophy.
Whut? A phage is a virus that infects bacteria. Short for “bacteriophage”. Phage therapy. It’s true that a mixture of phages is often given, but the way you phrase it makes it sound like you give the same kind of “bug” as is responsible for the infection.
Well, we could just keep the damn Euro.
Works fine, ask Greece.
Kristjan Wager
AFAICT, this is a bit more accurate, as there weren’t any native Danish coins until the very tail end of the Viking Age (which ended in 1066, per Wiki, while Denmark didn’t have a national mint until the 1020s).
re rusty @et al :
I’ve been trying to catchup with this verbose thread and rusty’s replies have sometimes been [umm] interesting. From reading rusty I’ve acquired the opinion that he is only criticising bits and pieces of the current system and using only bits and pieces of libertarianism as “solutions” to those problems. The term we use commonly around here is “cherry-picker”. Rusty, consider the real implications of implementing the whole of libertarianism, not just specific pieces. Recognize that EVERTHING possesses flaws, nothing is absolutely perfect. Some of your critisisms are accurate and solving each, individually, might be addressed by some of your proposals. The mistake is to generalize it to be the solution to all problems with none of its own. Listening to rusty makes me recall the ancient maxim (either Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle) “Everything in moderation.” So, even so parts of your philosophy may be better than the existing situation, implement your proposal in moderation. Don’t apply it to everything.
And listen to us carefully (i.e. reading comprehension). Saying libertarians are sociopathic is not the same as calling them sociopaths. *pathic means possessing some of the qualities of the state (of mind), a *path implies possessing ALL of them. Even Rand recognized society as a real thing, and necessary to be successful. Her complaint was letting society dictate what the individual can and must do. But she did agree that individual success helps society and everybody in society. She did not specify HOW that actually occurs, just that it would. What you are proposing is decomposing all of society into only individuals and ‘each one for oneself” just doesn’t work well at all. Okay, I’m overextending what I intended to write. The gist of it is “in moderation, consider fully all the ramifications of your suggestions. Don’t just cherry-pick.”
@Nerd of Redhead #376
One of the things that Czech Republic more or less reetained from its socialist era as USSR satelite was universal healthcare. During the time of change we had a pretty libertarian (although he never called himself such) finance minister, our later president Václav Klaus. He was and remains typical “free market worshipper” and socipathic asshole. One of the things he and his ilk were unable to push through was privatisation of the health care in accordance with US, but the push to do so is still here and slowly, inevitably, changes are being made increasingly for the worse and US model is still by some seen as “the best”.
It is interesting and somehow depressint to observe, how these supposedly rational people cannot see, that we (CZ) achieve more or less the same result as US at a quarter of the cost, as seen in the article you linked to. Do not fix that which ain’t broken and all that.
Rusty, you are one single medical misfortune away from personal bankrupcy. Nobody, except the most rich from birth and the most lucky ones, is able to save enough money for treatment of a plethora of ilnesses, which strike absolutely indiscriminately among the poor and the rich alike.
Charly:
People would do well to remember that. Somewhere in everyone’s life is a person who has smacked into that medical misfortune, and it would be a good thing to have a chat with that person, to get a very clear idea of what happens.
Yeah, I hear you Caine. The Redhead’s stroke could have really devastated us, except I from the time I started at my present job, I had, unknown to her, instituted a savings plan. Which came in handy when the insurance didn’t cover about a month of rehab….after all, the leading cause of bankruptcy is medical bills…
I wonder how many people out there in America are really financially capable of supporting a sick family member like rusty seems to think they should. Not bloody very many, I would wager, as wages have stagnated and benefits disappeared due to those libertarian heroes of business. I think that my generation is probably going to be the last one that will be able to count on help from their parents as they strain for financial independence in this job climate.* By the time our kids grow up, they’re gonna be screwed worse than we are.
* And that’s before I reflect on just how many folks in my generation are actually as lucky as I am in that regard.
Nerd:
Yep, it’s terrifying, really. We are lucky, we have good insurance, but even with that, if the massive medical hits, we’re still going to be screwed.
@Rey Fox #387
My husband ( a school district employee) had a massive stroke (blood clot in the cerebellum, which is usually fatal) a couple of years ago, and without work-related health coverage, disability insurance, a public employee pension, and social security, he would be dead, and I would be bankrupt.
Oh, poor rusty shackleford. He didn’t bother to lurk long enough to realize that this is a place where commenters tend to be more intelligent and more educated than most other sites on the internet, and, therefore, more demanding of other commenters. I usually just lurk because I know I’m not on a level with the regular commenters. But I come here every day, because it educates my never-went-to-college ass. Rusty, if you’re still around, let yourself learn.
Lindsay:
Holy shit. I’m glad he survived and you had enough of a social safety net to see you through. We *might* be able to get through one massive medical, but if a second one were to hit, well, no way.
@Caine, Fleur du mal #30
Thank you. It’s almost impossible to understand how precarious your life is until something like that happens. It obviously is impossible for many people.
Bicarbonate @#349:
I’m assuming this is absent any evidence that he’d broken any laws?
And, related, are there any other professions you’d like to summarily criminalise?
@libertarian postmodernist
I saw one person try to take you to task for this, but I needed to emphasize this.
In your meaning of the term “opinion”, it’s an opinion whether Mozart is better than Bach, whether spaghetti is better than stir fry.
To be considered a decent human being, you must hold the values that life is generally preferable to death, happiness is generally preferable to suffering, freedom is generally preferable to slavery, and and so on for the other values of humanism. It is not a matter of opinion which public policies best promote these values. We can analyze plans as to their efficacy under these values in an objective, scientific way. This is as much a disagreement over opinion as evolution-vs-creationism is a disagreement over opinion.
We are not having a disagreement of opinion. We are having a disagreement over material facts. I happen to be right, and you are wrong, because evidence.
…
After reading half the thread, I haven’t seen a good reply to this one yet.
First, to get this out of the way: Taxes are an initiation of force. You are born into this world, and you do not have the option to go to a place where there is no taxes. Furthermore, if you do not pay your taxes for long enough, eventually a man will come to your house with a gun.
IMHO, the fatal flaw to libertarian thought is the combination of (1) the material fact of finite material resources, (2) private property rights, (3) inheritance of private property, (4) no initiation of force – and here’s the kicker – except to uphold private property rights. All enforcement of private property rights is the initiation of force. The idea that an apple is an extension of your body and worthy of the same legal protections is a cultural fiction – a sometimes useful fiction but a fiction nonetheless.
AFAIK, we can trace back the modern moral theory of private property to Locke. However, Locke’s basis is fundamentally unsound. The central argument is that if I own an apple and let it rot, it does you no harm because you are free to go out into the public forest and get your own apple. At the time, there were no such public forests in England, but Locke used America as an example of a place where land is
free to be stolen from the native inhabitants by forced relocation and genocidefree to be claimed. Even in Locke’s day, and even ignoring the native inhabitants, this is a bullshit argument. It’s not free to go there. It’s risky to go there. Quality of life may be less there because you’re so far away from civilization. Etc.However, in today’s world where all land is already owned and claimed, what little of the argument is left breaks down completely. In today’s world where all land is already owned, the enforcement of private property rights is a moral harm against other people. There is absolutely no reason I can think of which justifies that because of purely an accident of birth, you should be entitled to enjoy the fruits of the land while I cannot. This is even more true when you let the apples of the land go to waste while I am wanting for apples.
I’m not saying that we should get rid of private property rights entirely. I think that limited private property is an indispensable tool for personal happiness and for the creation of material wealth via specialization of labor ala capitalism. However, I think we need to ditch this notion that you are entitled to inviolable private property rights, especially when you own more than your neighbor.
The right goals in life are happiness, safety, material wealth, freedom, etc. Those goals do not take a backseat to this fictitious and evil value of absolute private property rights. Private property is a fiction as a means to the ends of happiness, safety, material wealth, etc., not an ends unto itself.
In my experience, libertarians are evenly split between those who think that private property rights are a moral end unto itself, or think that inviolable private property rights – except taxes for a small special-pleading list of exceptions – is a demonstrably good way to achieve happiness, safety, material wealth, freedom, etc. I take that back – most libertarians are too ignorant and confused to know where they stand on this. They probably never seriously considered the idea that their plans are not the best plans to achieve the values of human well-being.
#392
Yes!!!
1) Fox News commentating
2) Greedy bankers
3) All the teachers of Michelle Bachman’s since kindergarten
….
99) Lady Gaga’s stylist
quaint @392
Oh, I don’t know, maybe your profession, whatever that is.
I agree with everything JAL and EnlightenmentLiberal said.
Also on subject of a social safety net being beneficial to all, does anyone really think if (for instance) food stamps were cut off entirely that those of us who depend on them would just peaceably starve to death? I know I wouldn’t. In fact I know from past experience that I will steal rather than go hungry, and if I couldn’t manage that then I guess I’d just have to make an exception to my veganism and start hunting fuckers like Rusty.
If I might point out, EstablishmentLiberal, an interesting (and somewhat unpleasant) thing you did there:
My point: It is good that you noted the stealing and genociding. This is too often forgotten. However, do you think perhaps the people whose land were being stolen, and who were suffering attempted genocide (since many still exist, including posting in this very thread), might have had an opinion about “how far away civilization was” from their lands? Because I suspect that had they been asked, they’d have suggested that civilization was, in fact, already there, and thus wasn’t far away at all. That the too-pale folk doing the land-stealing didn’t recognize it was kind of the problem, no?
I mention this because while I totally get that your intent was to be inclusive, I want to add the nuance that even when we do make the inclusive choice, sometimes we then undermine it almost immediately by betraying the assumptions that underlie the very racism we decry.
For your consideration. It seems likely that this was contra-intentional, but I think it’s good to point it out when it happens, because it’s all too easy to fall into those old patterns of imperialist assessment of what is Right and Good.
CaitieCat:
Indeed. People often feel free to say the nastiest things about Indians, thinking that none of us are around. Ever. Thanks. :fistbump:
This is the part where it’s becoming obscene.
If it could be undeniably shown that using money from a 1% income tax could end hunger and starvation in the country, then I say it is a moral obligation to do so. Even if 99% of the money goes to waste via corruption and inefficiency. Even if 99% of the money goes to lazy asses who choose not to work because the program. It would be a moral obligation, and anyone who would be against such a program is amongst the most vile scum of humanity.
Furthermore, the 1% income tax number is extreme exaggeration. The actual cost to society to program goddamned food stamps is amazingly small.
And yet many Republicans in this country are now trying to end food stamps, just like this libertarian goddamned asshole in this thread. Amazing.
What the hell does responsibility have to do with it? We know now that there are millions of malnourished and underfed children in the US today. Thus it has been demonstrated that the private sector is incapable of feeding the poor children of this country. It is within our power to end hunger in the US today, and yet shits like you stand in the way.
Against food stamps. I can’t even make this up. Short of torture porn, I cannot even imagine a more horrible position that a person could hold. You are a miserable excuse of a human being.
cm #392
Or, you know, you could read that sentence in the normal way, and interpret it to mean “The things which he does ought to be against the law, such that he would face jail time for having done them, inasmuch as the things which he does professionally are harmful and have zero social benefit.” This statement is perfectly accurate; hedge funds are useful for no purpose but to accumulate money for the managers of same, and actively damage the rest of the economy in the process. It is not at all unreasonable to support the criminalization of such activities, and I wholeheartedly agree with Bicarbonate on this point.
A considerable number of professions in the financial industry, like hedge funds, amount to swindlers and scam artists. However, because of extremely poor regulation of the financial industry, they are not doing things which are against the law. Since they are, in fact, selling snake oil and, as noted, harming others, I see no reason why the law should continue to tolerate their behaviour. Do you? If so, please explain your reasoning.
Caine:
Pilimayaye, lady. I can’t give back the land, cause I don’t own any. But I can help stand watch over it.
:fistbump:
Crap, as soon as I hit post, I realized I’d spelt it wrong. Sorry. :)
@Caine, Fleur du mal
Indeed. I am one. Or at least 8% Cherokee or some such.
@CaitieCat
Good call. I did not mean to denigrate any native American culture.
However, I perhaps sense a kind of postmodernist cultural relativism in your critique, which I reject in the strongest possible terms. In order to promote humanism, it is requisite to judge cultures and sometimes determine that one culture is simply better than another. See the work of Sam Harris for my basic position on this.
Possible; I am a postmodernist, so that would make sense. But also, your whole contention was poorly put: it wasn’t less safe there, it was less safe for invaders. It wasn’t far from civilization, it was far from Western European civilization. Those things are not equivalents. Not all people are invaders, and thus need feel unsafe around people who are being invaded; not all civilizations are Western European ones. Basic logic.
You may want to consider the vaguely hole-shaped area you now occupy, before taking up your shovel? I suggest, only. If you want to rent the traditional backhoe, by all means, but do realize you will get called on it if you disappear the First Nations, not least because members of those nations are posting and reading here, but simply because of an absolutist humanist value, that it is wrong to do so inherently. k? K.
Living as I do, thanks to accident of birth, in a corner of the world where no-one will ever be bankrupted to pay medical bills (barring a major disaster in the form of hypothetical future governments hell-bent on slavishly imitating the viciously inefficient US health system), I would not swap the freedom from fear this affords me for any amount of the “freedoms” promised by rusty et al in their dystopian vision. I only wish everyone shared that particular freedom from fear. Better outcomes for less outlay – now shouldn’t the libertarian ideal of competition mean looking at that difference, and promptly adopting, say, a European system? If, of course they were as rational as they pretend instead of actually being fantasists who live in a little house on the prairie inside their heads.
CaitieCat:
Eh, one letter off. :D
EnlightenmentLiberal:
Yeah, I can see that “native american” somesuch shit is real important, a serious part of you and your lifestyle. I’m half Oglala Lakota. I’d just love to chat with you about rez life and all that, but this isn’t the place. Taŋyáŋ ištíŋma ye.
I believe Johnny Depp is also 1/8 Somesuch.
Bicarbonate @#395:
Charmed, I’m sure. I decline to reciprocate, however, despite not working for a hedge fund. ;-)
Seriously, though, do you really make a habit of saying people on the internet should be in jail because you think so? How authoritarian!
—
Dysomniak @#400:
You know, you can make the same claim about tattoo parlours, artisan cheesemakers, and vintage clothes shops, but it wouldn’t make it true.
@CaitieCat
Take a step back, and chill.
I said I did not mean to denigrate any native American culture. I still do not have any such intention. I apologize for any improper nuance in that regard.
However, I do object to the undertones and now explicit overtones of postmodernism. I find your cultural relativist notions just as morally outrageous as the libertarian asshat in this thread, perhaps moreso. If you actually hold to the position that any culture is just as good as any other culture, you can only do so in profound ignorance of the actual harm experienced by people in those cultures, or in a state of a despicable lack of basic human decency and empathy. I am the one who actually gives a damn about the suffering of women as chattel in many Muslim countries, of the people in the hellhole of North Korea, and so on.
PS: And yes, I don’t really care about the arbitrary fact that I happened to have one grandparent or great grandparent who was Cherokee. Doesn’t matter to me. You’re welcome to your racial or historical-cultural pride. I just don’t have any. I have pride in other, important, things.
Oh yeah, and what I said in
LakotaSomesuch wasn’t nasty, just good night.EnlightenmentLiberal:
Oooh look, a Dear Muslima. Golly, guess we better straighten up and fly right, eh?
Amazingly enough, we didn’t have any problem figuring that out.
It’s about people. It’s about lives, waslolyesni wasicu. (Okay, that’s not nice.)
EnlightenmentLiberal:
I hope I’m mistaken in my reading of certain implications there…
EnlightenmentLiberal:
I recognize and give a damn about the suffering of women across the globe.
No need to minimize the experiences of those that don’t meet arbitrary standards of suffering.
@Caine, Fleur du mal
Dear Muslima was Dawkins being super retarded by in effect saying you cannot complain about one evil when there is another great evil. Or something. It was really stupid.
I’m noting in fact that some cultures are worse than other cultures in an objective, verifiable, demonstrable scientific sense. Either you think that the subjugation of women as chattel is a bad thing, or are you are a despicable human being.
Using my favorite Sam Harris example. Let’s consider a hypothetical fictitious society. Let’s suppose we locate some obscure hidden culture which had no contact with the outside world. Let’s suppose that the culture put out the eyes of every third child because of a religious scripture that said “every third shall walk in darkness”. Can you agree with me that this culture is not maximizing human well-being? Can you agree with me that there are probably ways to interfere in that culture in a moral, human, civil, and respectful way to help end that practice and make that society a better society?
Put another way, surely you think the emancipation of blacks in the US was a good thing, yes? Thus the culture immediately before was a worse culture than the culture immediately after where blacks were (technically) freed? That is, they are going in the objectively correct direction? Or do you think that there is no advancement of culture, and any change is just as likely to backfire as to work? Do you vote?
At least the libertarian asshat recognizes that we should work towards human well-being. You are more despicable than he.
Tony:
Oh, I doubt you are. EnlightementLiberal tried to make the correct noises, but in the end, kept justifying the attempted extermination of all Indians and the land stealing, then dumping us all in untenable conditions in rank poverty, because, y’know, our culture was all backwards and stuff. Not civilised. I expect the same line of thought applies to other peoples.
Culture is fluid, not a monolithic entity. Can we not turn this into a cultural superiority pissing contest? Please?
Libertarians aren’t working toward universal human wellbeing unless you think that every person is a universe unto themselves.
There is every need to minimize postmodernist cultural relativists. They are a blight far worse than libertarians. At least libertarianism is compatible with giving a damn.
@Caine, Fleur du mal @ 415
Talk about an utter lack of all reading comprehension. I am done engaging in this conversation with one so willfully dishonest as you.
Sam Harris is stupider than I thought if he really uses weird fictional societies as examples, rather than real ones.
EnlightenmentLiberal
This wins the smarmiest comment award for most pompous ignorance in three sentences or less.
EnlightenmentLiberal
This is inarguable. The problem that you appear to be missing is your apparent assumption that in a humanistic comparison between the cultures of the European Atlantic Seaboard (Great Britain, France, etc) and those of the North American Atlantic Seaboard (e. g. the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mi’kmaq, etc) that the European ones can be not just adjudged but assumed to superior in humanistic terms. This contention is extremely problematic for a number of reasons, beginning with the racist and colonialist attitudes embodied by the initial assumption, and moving on to the deep historical ignorance underlying it. Indeed, even a casual knowledge of the state of human rights in the latter mentioned nations versus the former will indicate that residents of e.g. the Haudenosaunee Confederacy could expect a considerably smaller probability of experiencing human rights violations (from members of their own culture anyway; the likelihood that Europeans might do so is another matter entirely) than could a resident of any European country at that time
cm #408
When tattooists, cheesemakers, and/ or clothiers have caused the collapse of a major world economy, do let me know.
EnlightenmentLiberal (#403)
CaitieCat’s point was one about safety and security, which is relative (to a point). How much safety and security one can find within the culture of a bunch of genocidal, land-thieving slavers depends a great deal one one’s race, for instance.
(#409)
Maybe you should look up the statistics on sexual violence against Native American women sometime.
@chigau (違う)
I don’t even… what? Why? What’s wrong with using a hypothetical to make clear the point?
The use of the hypothetical allows one to differentiate between legitimate grievances and not.
It is in practice impossible to compare most cultures in the world today, although some exceptions exist, such as Somalia, North Korea. Sometimes people will complain about judging cultures in principle when their complaint is that it’s difficult or impossible in practice.
Furthermore, a second problem is that even if you identify a culture which is worse, or a cultural aspect which is bad, it does not follow that interference will make it better. Frequently interference produces more harm than benefit. Again, a simple hypothetical like that one can allow us to explore whether the parties think that any possibility of a probably-beneficial interference, or whether all interference is doomed to failure.
Again, could you please explain what you believe and why you believe it, because I am completely lost.
@CM I didn’t make post 400, that was Dalillama. But I also agree.
Wow. Warned that you’re in a hole, EnlightenmentLiberal breaks out the dynamite. Is cultural relativism and postmodernism (which, I note, no-one was suggesting in any extreme form) really such a red button for you?
Also
is disengenous, given that your ‘nym is pretty clearly a proud expression of historic-cultural identity.
LOL, stripeycat, that’s not an expression of historic-cultural identity! It’s an argument for absolute value! Obviously, the difference is that the Enlightenment European society is the highest achievement of civilization, and no other cultural realization could possibly have such noble values, or such perfect understanding of
mythe human mind!BTW, what’s “confirmation bias” mean, again?
@Dalillama, Schmott Guy
I never made that comparison. No honest reading of anything I wrote could be understood to mean that. If any doubt remains, I again state that I do not denigrate any native American culture, and I do not judge any native American culture to be better or worse than any other, primarily due to my extreme ignorance of those cultures.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
I’m having trouble understanding this “my culture is the BEST culture” thing. Even, for the sake of argument, if it were a universally provable fact that one culture was “the best”, what then, exactly?
How do you magically transplant that culture to every person on the planet without a global totalitarian regime of what amounts to cultural extermination? Mao tried something similar once. Turned out so well.
Also, you may not care about any culture but your own, but what if the “best” culture turned out to be something other than what you’re used to? You’d be the one on the figurative cultural chopping block. Would you adopt completely foreign laws and customs, perhaps even a foreign language that threw your entire way of life into complete disarray?
Yeah, no.
I identify with the good values of the Enlightenment. I don’t have pride in my racial heritage nor other … arbitrary (for want of a better word) … aspects of my ancestors’ cultures.
I dare you. Find any place where anything I said can be honestly construed to mean that.
Just the fact that you used the phrase “historical-cultural pride” indicates that you think those cultures no longer exist. Hint: they do. For reals, not pretend reenactments. People are a part of them. Did you know that there are still reservations and that people live on them?
Yes. This is what it means to be a humanism and a scientist. You wouldn’t? What? Why?
@EnlightenmentLiberal
Sure, no worries.
You don’t specifically mention one being the best, but that’s where you’re headed with the demonstrable provable line of reasoning.
Start talking about values rather than cultures and you might get somewhere.
Mr. Changeable and Quaint,
And what made you assume in the first place that I had no evidence the hedge fund operator was not doing reprehensible or illegal things? It was an example. It was not a comment about hedge fund operators in general but about work, hard work and the hardness of the work making it somehow good, with respect to what Rusty Shackles had said @ 320
As if work is necessarily good and its rewards just and as if those who are not rewarded are just lazy.
From there you jump to me supposedly wanting to
other professions and then to my being in the
I think so.
In other words, you are hoping to find in me a sort of knee-jerk leftist bigot or useful idiot or something upon whom you can vent your wrath or that you can use to cure your boredom. You are assuming that I genuflect at every station of the leftist cross like Mommy taught me to do.
I am not afraid of being called
or any of the other bad words that ought to send people like the person you think I am scuttling back to a little dark hole.
Carlie:
Hey, I offered to have a chat about rez life…
@433
Meh. I posted in haste. Obviously the cost of moving from one culture to another should be taken into account before deciding change.
@Sophia
Nope.
A prereq to a conversation is an honest discussion partner. As soon as you stop strawmanning my position by inventing things to me which I have not said, and own up to that strawmanning, then we can continue having a conversation.
Because I live in the real world, where cultures aren’t things you can just abandon because they shape the entire fabric of our society?
You seem to be under the impression that your culture isn’t a culture. Or that you’re “cultureblind” or something. That’s… interesting.
Tell me exactly where the strawman is and I’ll gladly abandon it. You said some cultures are better than others. I said cultures are not monolithic, and that the problem is values and not culture.
Where’s the straw?
enlightenment Liberal
The negative reaction you are getting is not due to your views on culture. It is because you clearly stated contempt towards anyone who does identify as Indian.
Who are you to tell anyone what aspect of their heritage is, or is not important?
EnlightementLiberal #428
In post #393, you defined the North American Atlantic seaboard as
When you were called on this, by people pointing out that the existing nations in North America would also constitute civilization, you responded
Now, given the fact that CaitieCat merely pointed out the existence of civilization at the destination point, the obvious interpretation of this response is that you consider her position to be ‘postmodern cultural relativism’ which doesn’t ‘determine sometimes that one culture is better than another’ is that you feel that the invading culture was, in fact, better. If you were not arguing this, then there is no reason to complain of cultural relativisim in CaitieCat’s post, as it would be an unexeptionable statement of historical fact.
Apologies, dysomniak, my bad.
Dalillama @#422:
And remind me again, when hedge funds did that, and (with citations) how.
I’m serious.
I don’t think you understand what hedge funds are, nor how finance works.
For example:
This is where I get out my WikiText keyboard and start marking things up with [how many] and [citation needed]. Which professions? Corporate finance, trade finance, syndicated loans, corporate debt, equity IPOs, equity follow-ons, mezzanine finance, securitised lending, CLOs, CDOs, private equity, angel investments, convertible bonds, COCOs, et al.? Which things?
So: explain which things they are doing that you think should be illegal. What regulation should be introduced to stop them.
[citation needed]
Translation: I don’t know what they’re doing, but I don’t like the sound of it. Jail ’em.
Lovely.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
My comment was in response to this, from you:
I took this comment to mean that you give a damn about women suffering when it reaches a certain level. My response was meant to point out that women across the planet are suffering in a variety of ways and their experiences and suffering are minimized when its implied that what they’re going through isn’t a big deal.
Oh, and libertarianism is *not* compatible with giving a damn. Have you not read this thread?
EnglightenmentLiberal (#424)
What the fuck does that have to do with CaitieCat questioning your assumption that the “civilization” of a bunch of genocidal, land-thieving slavers provided a superior quality of life? You weren’t talking principles but referring to a real-world example.
Also, what Dalillama said in #441.
@Kristjan Wager #375
@stevem #59
-O.K., which one of you opponents of mine here is correct?
#59 -stevem, you’re right on your first claim, however, unbacked paper is notorious for its ability to be abused by governments, which is why I don’t prefer it to be used as money. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCNS?cid=9
Look what happens after 1971. Why do you think real wages peaked in the Nixon years?
#375-Deflation is bad for debtors, but it is good for savers.
cm @ 442
Yeah, see, I was right you want to defend the financial professions against us ignorant leftists. So, educate us, please, on the social contribution of hedge funds.
Right after you explain why I should be in jail because you say so
*backatcha*
@447
You know I was just playing with you.
I believe I’ll have another beer.
While searching for a spherical culture in a vacuum.
I’ll be looking for spherical bankers, as well.
@449 Chigau
Can I join you in that search and can I have a beer too?
Chigau:
I’ll be looking for the vast and wondrous Somesuch Nation.
@451 Caine
How ’bout we found the Somesuch Nation. Has a nice ring to it.
Bicarbonate:
Heh. We’re gonna have to…appropriate us some land.
@453 Caine
Oh Goody! But let’s make sure the people on it are savages.
Bicarbonate:
:snort: Great, now we’re going to have to have committees to figure out what constitutes a savage, and their complete lack of civilisation, and are we going for the classic noble savage, or the scary savage, etc.
I think we have here being generous to Dale Dribble and my own abilities to think clearly is a case of someone who feels put upon by society and his economic plight of not progressing fast or further enough given the history of the last 40 years as he thought he would have. He is a reasonably intelligent person maybe even posses some technical skills but is ignorant about a lot of things that make up our world and how they work. He has allowed some underling resentment to grow. That resentment is being fed by libertarian rabble rousers at heart he probably shares more with social democratic politics but is blinded by his resentments and the certitude and emotional appeal of libertarian rhetoric. Hence his problems with finding evidence to support his recently adopted ideology and actually making an argument based on real information and not emotional buzz phrases.
I have struggled through this long thread today the first of the year and could despair but I will refrain from that just yet. I have had similar conservations with people with similar reactions and unevidenced social beliefs before I know that they can learn to see thing more clearly I do not always have the patience. Thanks everyone for helping me think clearly it is one of the things that give me hope for the coming year!
uncle frogy
@455 Caine
True. And I hate being on committees. It would be easier to just send a letter to the Pope and ask him if they have souls but he seems to be too liberal these days. Or maybe we could use the Ordeal, if they sink, they have souls and if they float, they don’t, in which case we kill them.
@Caine & Bicarbonate I thought you were going to take land from Fred, Corey, Dan, and Adam (Savage).
Bicarbonate:
Mmm, very effective method. We’ll do that!
cm
Start here, then move on to this.
Enopoletus Harding #445
This part:
is wrong, but otherwise there’s no conflict between what stevem said and what Kristjan said.
Once again you’re showing your historical ignorance regarding the currency shenanigans engaged in in the past. You would be helped enormously by doing a bit of research.
The destruction of unions and a minimum wage which failed utterly to keep pace with economic change.
And this is another problem with libertarian economics, the insistence of looking at everything as atomised transactions between two people, and/or using the economic behaviour of an individual as a proxy for the entire economy, both of which stem from a complete inability to recognize systemic effects. While a ‘saver’ might see some minor benefit to their existing bank balance during a deflationary period, it is far outweighed by the overall reduction in economic activity which prevents said account from growing as fast as it could have in a better economic situation.
Caine, Bicarbonate – Just make sure the culture you establish is scientifically provably the best. :P
Kevin:
I don’t think that’s enough land. This is the mighty, vast and great Civilisation of Somesuch, man!
Sophia:
Erm…I name Sophia Science Minister of Somesuch.
Ughhh. Re. gold as currency, it’s never been said better than:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/11/fictitious-wealth-and-ludwig-von-mises.html
*grump*
Somesuch Nation,
We must think ahead to the time when our grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to idealize the Savages and start having dream catchers mass-produced in China.
CM,
You said you were going to explain the social utility of hedge funds to us ignornts.
Somesuch Nation,
I just realised I’ll have to abandon my entire culture to become Somesuchified. Though then, thankfully, I realised that since I’m of Imperialist European descent my culture is pretty universal already, so changing my entire way of life is completely feasible. Or unnecessary. Or something.
Science! :D
Heh, I used to follow Krugman, but I unsubbed after too many Arcade Fire videos. BdL keeps me covered.
Qutes or it ddn’t happn. I asked for examples of damage to society (or more accurately, to the economy).
Cm,
No, you said you’d explain it if I said why your profession should go to jail.
CM,
You said that @447:
1 January 2014 at 7:40 pm (UTC -6)
Yeah, see, I was right you want to defend the financial professions against us ignorant leftists. So, educate us, please, on the social contribution of hedge funds.
Right after you explain why I should be in jail because you say so
*backatcha*
cm #468
What in the Pope’s palatial pissoir are you prating about now?
The relevance of Quebecois indie-rock bands and the Bradley International Airport escape me. You asked for an explanation of how hedge funds negatively affected the economy, so I linked you to one that’s concise and easy for someone without much grasp of the U.S. economy and what’s happened to it over the past few decades to understand. Krugman provided such a thing, so I linked to him. If you feel that you can refute this position, by all means try.
I wonder if rusty shackleford is coming back.
chigau:
I wonder if Rusty will click any of the various links throughout this thread.
I wonder if CM has bailed.
You misunderestimate me.
Do you still want me to go to jail for doing what I do despite the fact you don’t know what I do?
I already told you. Stop hedging.
Doesn’t CM usually make sense?
Anyway, “EnlightenmentLiberal” reminds me of all the “RationalMindMan” and “SkepticalThinker” ‘nyms we’ve seen over the years. Choosing a ‘nym like that is either an announcement of lack of self-awareness, and maybe also an obstacle to self-awareness. Like, if you’re handing out business cards with “Chet the Self-Aware” on them, how likely is it that you’re going to be able to hear your friend trying to tell you that you lack self-awareness? Less likely than otherwise, is my educated surmise.
SallyStrange:
No.
I thought hedge funds typically don’t even “hedge” these days.
no need to.
Actually, I do believe in a lot of the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Re territory for the Somesuch Nation: “Reverse Tordesillas” the Catholic Church. Easy peasy!
–
I mean, it’s not as if the RCC is showing signs of ‘civilized culture’. Doctrinally Discover their asses!
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*ouch*
I do try, you know.
Dalillama has asserted that hedge funds cause economic damage, but only by citing a Paul Krugman post that rails against their excessive pay packages. (I think this is probably a mis-link; I can find PK posts that are more directly condemnatory.)
In the meantime, Bicarbonate has apparently decided that I, somewhere upthread, committed to explain how hedge funds are totally awesome and contribute substantially to economic growth because (deeply hinted) that’s what I do for a living, which of course, I (not working for a hedge fund) can’t.
So, I’m not gonna do that either.
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And now it’s a meta-discussion about whether I’m generally sensible.
Hmm. If this makes sense, yes. If not, no. Your call.
CM
Anti-climax. Too bad. I was all ears, really.
In the meantime, you seem to be dying to reveal what you do for a living.
Bicarbonate, I was talking to other people. Thanks for butting in.
Yeah, that’s why I’ve taken my four or five opportunities to do exactly that in this thread.
I used to work for the OECD translating economic documents most usually concerning the impact of food aid to Sahelian economies.
Once I went to big boss man and said, “Can I ask you a simple and stupid question?”
He nodded (always very obliging) and I said, “Why is there less money in the world for people like me than there was when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s?”
He said, “Do you mean m1, m2 or m3?”
A few months later I was relieved of my duties and he asked his wife to take me to a Catholic charity to buy some clothes.
I leaned a lot. I also had to summarize and translate into French U.S. food policy for American diplomats stationed in French Africa.
I learned for instance that all the food had to be shipped on American ships and that this supported that industry. It was all pretty good for the American economy.
Once I translated a document into English written by a lonely civil servant on the edge of the Sahara where he observed day in and day out the local farmer’s markets. His last sentence was, “I have put in an order for another pencil. This one is down to a crumb. I can’t write anymore.”
So, you see, CM, I do take every opportunity to learn and did hope you would at least challenge me. Didn’t happen.
Enlightenment Liberal
Yet of course you deemed yourself sufficiently educated about them to deem them inferior and less civilized compared to the genocidal, slave-keeping, rapist, extincionist Western Civilization™ (or as Ghandi famously said: yes, that would be a good idea).
Oh, wait, I forgot, Western Civilization was indeed superior to whatever Indians had to offer for the only people who ever matter: upper and upper middle-class straight white guys. After all they invented all the great values of humanism like freedom and bodily autonomy and equal vote and then they did their very best to keep them for themselves.
Mostly not directly related to hedge funds AFAIK, but it has increasingly emerged that banks and other finance corporations have been systematically breaking even the weak laws that exist to constrain them for years, e.g. Enron, the Libor scandal, and many others. Mostly, these crimes are “settled” by the institutions paying fines, although a few of the actual criminals have been fined or imprisoned.
You mean any culture that could produce such a shitbag as Sam Yay-for-racial-profiling-torture-and-genocide Harris must have something badly wrong with it?
Enopoletus Harding@445,
Because right-wing scumbags like you seized the opportunity of the 1970s economic crisis (caused primarily by oil-price rises and trying to fight the Vietnam War without raising taxes) to start the process of increasing inequality and rolling back working-class gains which they have continued ever since.
As has already been pointed out to you, it has the effect of discouraging spending, and thus investment. Savers can (and do) sit on their money and get richer. Look at the problems Japan has faced in the past 2 decades.
It’s true that ending fixed exchange rates has produced its own problems, but returning to the gold standard is (against stiff competition) perhaps the plain fucking stupidest libertarian nostrum of all. In the Great Depression (caused, of course, by financial deregulation and rising inequality, just like the financial crisis of 2008) it was those countries which left the gold standard first, which recovered first:
Under the post-WWII Bretton Woods system, it was only central banks which could exchange national currencies for gold, so it was far from the “return to the gold standard” that libertarians want. The increase in gold output has not kept pace with economic growth since WWII, so returning even to the Bretton Woods system would risk a lock-in to deflation.
*pops in*
*finds hints that somebody claimed deflation was a good thing*
*facepalms epically*
*leaves*
Sorry, link closure failure@492.
This thread got long.
This isn’t a long thread. They’ve gone 1400+ posts.
Typical liberturd, can’t put up, can’t shut up, positions of honesty and integrity. So they continue with obvious slogans, lies, and bullshit.
Nerd
I think your looking to far into my sentence about the length of a thread. It had no political insight or libertarian views. I was simply going back to see if this thread was still going on and it was.
Enopoletus Harding #445,
Others have already explained why this is only true if all other things were equal, which we know is not the case.
For those interested in the subject, Paul Krugman has written a good piece on this: Why Is Deflation Bad?
EnlightenmentLiberal #414
You do realize that Dawkin’s Dear Muslima comment was posted here at Pharyngula, right? There is no need to explain to the rest of us, many of whom participated in that particular discussion, what it was about. And I should probably mention, Caine was not the only one who thought of it when reading your comment.
Just when I was wondering if this thread was winding down, Rusty comes back. Let the roast resume.